gmc_nxtman wrote:I hope you enjoy these patterns. Please tell me if this is already known, or if I just discovered it, or if it's even useful for anything.
... Why are there no responses?
Heh, it happens. The usual excuse is that everyone is busy with some random esoteric topic, in their own little corner of CA-land.
The other reason might be that answering these questions is harder than asking them -- it takes some research to figure out what's new and what's not. So it was easier to wait and hope someone else would answer first...
In reverse order:
- The unchanged-glider reaction, if you tamed the active leftovers somehow, would be called a "pseudo-Heisenburp" -- because you do actually affect the glider for a few ticks, but then it reappears unscathed. The earliest Heisenburp devices, mostly by David Bell I think, used exactly this kind of pseudo reaction -- but this exact reaction is quite possibly new. That leftover explosion looks pretty energetic, though; probably any device based on taming those sparks would be a lot bigger and more complicated than known Heisenburp signal duplicators.
Further research showed that it was possible to detect a passing glider without affecting it at all, and without any live cells even coming in contact with it. See the four heisen-patterns in Golly's Patterns/Life/Signal-Circuitry.
- The H-to-G is indeed long known, and a number of different variants can be found in various guns in chris_c's new gun collection.
- The H-to-pi is not familiar to me, so it would be really interesting if it could be shown to connect to a something-to-Herschel conduit and a pi-to-something conduit, so that it could really be used in practice in signal circuitry. Seems to me there's no likely way to add catalysts to catch and process that output pi, before it destroys the conduit, while still allowing space for some other conduit to deliver a Herschel to the input spot.
-- Really I only say things like the above so that someone will prove me wrong! There are only two catalysts in the conduit, so the odds are good that several people have tested this combination sometime in the last two decades, and discarded it as unworkable. That doesn't mean they were right to do that... but the burden of proof is kind of on the publisher to show how it's useful, if everyone else decides the odds are too low to pursue it.
gmc_nxtman wrote:I've noticed that HighLife has a lot more c/2 spaceships than normal Life. At least Conway himself said
It seems that 'B36/S23' is the game I should have found, since it's so rich in nice things.
It's no doubt a bit silly for me to defend Conway's Life from Conway Himself -- but I feel like mentioning a few things anyway.
Conway wrote that in March 1994, only five years after people started discovering new spaceships in B3/S23... only the glider, LWSS, MWSS, and HWSS were known until 1989. Nowadays B3/S23 would win a spaceship competition over B36/S23, no contest -- more discoveries, more speeds, more different directions.
-- No doubt that's mostly just because it's gotten so much more attention, but there's definitely no shortage of c/2 stuff in Conway's Life. In particular, all the B-heptomino-based escorted spaceships (and unescorted -- see the
pufferfish!) -- work fine in B3/S23, but collapse horribly when sent to a HighLife universe.
1994 is also before stable reflectors were discovered, or Herschel tracks, or 2c/3 or lightspeed signal wires, or even true odd-period glider guns (!) Conway might be a bit happier about the array of "nice things" available in B3/S23 nowadays. It would be particularly interesting to find an equivalent to stable Herschel tracks in HighLife or another Life-like rule -- a tough job, since R-pentominos and pi- and B-heptominos don't travel well in HighLife at all, and it's not clear what other super-common active HighLife objects could be channeled instead.
Also, Conway did add a caveat right afterwards, that HighLife might not really be as good as it sounds, and "...does the typical configuration behave much as it does in lowlife, or is there perhaps a tendency for things to explode that people haven't been telling me about?"
Catagolue can maybe tell us a little about that nowadays. In an orders-of-magnitude smaller search space of only 50 million soups, there are
703 zz_EXPLOSIVE patterns, as well as the LINEAR and REPLICATOR ones.
That's either a good thing or a bad thing, I suppose, depending on what you're looking for. Certainly everyone would be picking their lower jaws up off the floor if Catagolue turned up a REPLICATOR object in B3/S23, and even an EXPLOSIVE or a new type of LINEAR would cause some serious dancing in the streets (even if I had to do it all myself). Just more B3/S23 Lifenthusiast prejudice, I suppose...!
So I would appreciate some feedback or if you can tell me whether these patterns are new or interesting. I also don't know how to properly post code 
, so I'll just paste the rle in for now.
