PK22 wrote: ↑October 18th, 2025, 6:16 am
Completed Thessalonic Demonoid:
ThessalonicDemonoid.mc
This is the first self-constructing spaceship with circuitry made up of only blocks and fishhooks.
Nice work! I've added a CurrentNews item on the LifeWiki home page. I specified "permanent circuitry", since the "ephemeral circuitry" includes temporary Snarks.
(Side note, we could avoid the Snarks if we really wanted to, by compiling a "ThessalonicGtoGmaker" and a "ThessalonicGtoGbreaker". I think the existing 0-degree salvo-making toolkit is just barely wide enough to make that possible, and we know how to make it a little wider if necessary.)
The CurrentNews item is careful to call out the permanent/ephemeral distinction, mostly because we do already have a variety of self-constructing spaceships that could even be called Blockic by some stretched-out-of-shape definition of "circuitry": e.g., at one point the
self-synthesizing oblique loopship is just a bunch of gliders plus a block.
PK22 wrote: ↑October 17th, 2025, 12:14 pm
Note that the long chains of Fx77s are to allow sufficient clearance for a Snarkmaker and then construct another edgeshooter unit via it.
Optimization isn't necessarily a design goal in a proof-of-concept new construction like this, but there are certainly some design adjustments that would allow for a much smaller Thessalonic Demonoid.
The first would be self-destruct circuitry. Blocks and eaters can make marvelously effective self-destruct circuitry. It would be a lot cheaper to skip the later-stage Snarkmakers and just send one glider to do the cleanup of the trailing Thessalonic reflector as soon as it is no longer in use. That trigger glider could either be sent from the construction arm, or it could be a separate trailing glider like in the 0hd Demonoid, with the timing adjusted just right.
The second is a reduction in the amount of circuitry, which would then reduce the amount of Thessalonic self-destruct circuitry that would need to be designed.
I haven't tried to assemble a Hashlife-friendly design without the long chains of Fx77s, but it seems like a scattering of Thessalonic G-to-2G splitters (like the one in the
Spartan G-to-W-to-H article, with maybe just a few more conduits added for timing reasons) could probably be arranged to replace the current circuitry. The Scorbie Splitter attachment has a transparent lane that could support the same trick as the NW31s you're using to interleave outputs to build a single-channel stream.
... If I'm not thinking of something obvious, please supply corrections. I'm up rather early, and my brain might not be entirely in working order yet.
