mniemiec wrote: ↑October 15th, 2021, 1:12 pm
When I search Catalogue for soups that make rare and exotic objects to find predecessors that may be amenable to glider syntheses, I often notice that a high percentage of soups that make the object do so by converging to the same predecessor, which is often difficult to synthesize...
Yeah, the "index fossils" that have a bottleneck that's difficult to synthesize are pretty disappointing. At first you think there are lots of soups to choose from and then it's really all the same thing a few ticks in.
That's when you find out that it's an index fossil, I suppose -- it's an exotic object that serves as a reliable sign that a soup has converged to some predecessor that's functionally identical to what every
other soup came up with.
On the other hand, in C1 soups, the only common way I can think of for a pattern to be a bottleneck (likely to show up multiple times) is if it's very low population, consisting of only a few clusters -- and things like that are at least easier to synthesize than your average 16x16 space dust.
Another still life showed up on Catagolue today for the first time that I would expect to be an index fossil -- i.e., it will turn out to come from the same exact set of three clusters, if it ever shows up again at all. The predecessor is
Code: Select all
x = 15, y = 23, rule = B3/S23
3bo$b3o$o$b2o$2bo4$13b2o$13b2o10$13bo$12bobo$11bobo$12bo!
and eventually that turns into a whole pile of junk plus
Code: Select all
x = 51, y = 37, rule = B3/S23
25b3o2$23bo5bo$23bo5bo$23bo5bo2$25b3o4$14b2o$3b3o8b2o6$b2o$o2bo$b2o$
31b2o$30bo2bo$31b2o$48b3o4$33b2o$16b2o4bo10b2o$15bo6bo$18bo3bo$16b2o3$
32b2ob2o$32bo3bo$33b3o!
-- which at least implies a synthesis that's
slightly less ridiculous than the cleanup you'd need after synthesizing the bottleneck!