The "New Conway"
Posted: June 10th, 2013, 6:46 am
I use the term "New Conway" in analogy with "New Physics", the collection of knowledge that will be gained with the discovery of the Higgs boson now confirmed. The snark is Life's analogue of the Higgs boson, and Bellman is the analogue of the Large Hadron Collider.
To find the snark, Bellman was fed a reaction with a glider, block and two eaters that produced a glider travelling at 90 degrees, as well as some flashbang (a chaotic part of a pattern). The program's job was merely to stop the flashbang from destroying the other components. What we need now is a program that searches for similar reactions - changing the colour of an input glider without changing its direction, or duplicating a glider, or even making an LWSS out of a glider.
The process of finding reactions is simple: collide the moving input object with some still-life, then as the pattern evolves, try and place eaters and blocks and other still-lifes and see if, after the reaction has ended, the desired outcomes have been achieved. It's not a perfect approach, but it's certainly faster than doing it by hand. I hope some sense can be made out of this post.
To find the snark, Bellman was fed a reaction with a glider, block and two eaters that produced a glider travelling at 90 degrees, as well as some flashbang (a chaotic part of a pattern). The program's job was merely to stop the flashbang from destroying the other components. What we need now is a program that searches for similar reactions - changing the colour of an input glider without changing its direction, or duplicating a glider, or even making an LWSS out of a glider.
The process of finding reactions is simple: collide the moving input object with some still-life, then as the pattern evolves, try and place eaters and blocks and other still-lifes and see if, after the reaction has ended, the desired outcomes have been achieved. It's not a perfect approach, but it's certainly faster than doing it by hand. I hope some sense can be made out of this post.