ConwayLife.com

77topaz wrote: ↑

January 28th, 2020, 12:23 am

Any updates on this?

Not before this decade ends and the next one begins!

KennyFromSouthPark wrote: ↑

January 28th, 2020, 12:55 am

77topaz wrote: ↑

January 28th, 2020, 12:23 am

Any updates on this?

Not before this decade ends and the next one begins!

To clarify, I was asking testitem for an update on when he was going to summarise the nominations and post the final poll entries, which his previous post suggested he would do a few days ago.

It's probably difficult for one person to summarize all the entries. Those who think they understand the finer points of a particular entry should try to give a short summary. For example, here is a summary of one of my nominations:

• New gun designs (by Tanner Jacobi): clever new gun components that allow the reduction of a large number of glider guns in the small guns collection.

Summaries should be short (one or two sentences) with the link ideally giving more information.

I nominate the P7 pipsquirter variants

We need to summarize all of the nominees and make a final list to vote on. Note that some of the nominees have not made it into the list in the first post, so we need to make sure those are included as well.

Here are my proposals for some entries:

• David Hilbert (by Luka Okanishi and Aidan F. Pierce): the first known period-23 oscillator and the first new oscillator period in over half a decade.
• Spider syntheses (by Martin Grant, Goldtiger997, et al.): the first synthesis of a c/5 spaceship and several reductions. Spider is the largest elementary spaceship so far synthesized.
• Dueling banjos and gun (by Apple Bottom, Tanner Jacobi, and Matthias Merzenich): a new period-24 oscillator that allows the construction of a very compact p24 gun.
• Knightwave stabilization (by Matthias Merzenich and Adam P. Goucher): the first known extensible (2,1)c/6 spaceship.
• 46P4H1V0 synthesis and gun (by Tanner Jacobi, Martin Grant, and Goldtiger997): The first synthesis and gun for a c/4 orthogonal spaceship.
• R49 (by Entity Valkyrie and Luka Okanishi): a useful compact conduit that interacts with a pre-Herschel.
• p49 oscillator (by Martin Grant and Jason Summers): the first known period-49 oscillator that is not a glider loop.
• New gun designs (by Tanner Jacobi): clever new gun components that allow the reduction of a large number of glider guns in the small guns collection.
• p250 c/10 orthogonal rake (by christoph r.): a c/10 rake with the lowest period so far achieved.

I still think we should combine some of the mid-period sparkers into one entry. There are the p13 sparkers and 230P8 already nominated, but also the p7 pipsquirter and p6 domino sparker variants by Dongook Lee and several p8 sparkers by 2718281828: [1], [2] (only right one is new), [3]. I didn't receive much feedback on this proposal earlier. What do others think?

Sokwe wrote: ↑

January 29th, 2020, 3:58 am

Note that some of the nominees have not made it into the list in the first post, so we need to make sure those are included as well.

Yes, I notice that all the nominees are not into the list.

I suppose there must be some good reasons for that, but I'm not sure I fully understand which ones.

GilGil wrote: ↑

January 29th, 2020, 7:34 am

Yes, I notice that all the nominees are not into the list.

I suppose there must be some good reasons for that, but I'm not sure I fully understand which ones.

I think it may have just been a mistake. For example, scholar has been independently nominated by several people but didn't make it onto the nominee list.

Macbi wrote: ↑

January 4th, 2020, 4:30 am

I nominate the patterns found by Nick Gotts in his Systematic survey of small patterns, including Bunnies 10a which broke a long-standing record for population 10 methuselahs.

Thanks! I'm surprised (but of course, honoured) for this to be nominated, but I note:
1) That the systematic search of small patterns isn't yet finished (only the two- and three-cluster patterns with 10 cells remain to be done - I'm not going to attempt 11 cells, which is clearly beyond the capacity of my PC andor software).
2) Bunnies10a has been superceded by bunnies10b, as reported on the "Long-lived Methuselahs" page: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2758&p=85059#p85059. This lasts 17431 ticks, with the same final result as bunnies10a (both have one fewer glider than the original bunnies10, IIRC).

Here's a proposed description of that entry:

• Systematic survey of small patterns (by Nick Gotts): a systematic survey of all patterns up to 9 cells, as well as a survey of all single-cluster 10-cell patterns resulting in the discovery of a new longest-lived 10-cell methuselah, bunnies 10b.

I've tried to write summaries of all of the nominees:

EDIT by dvgrn: had to remove the numbers, because the items are in a different order from testitemqlstudio's list in the LifeWiki article, and therefore different from the numbers in the voting thread -- seemed like leaving them in here would be bound to cause some horrible confusion somehow.

• David Hilbert (by Luka Okanishi and Aidan F. Pierce): the first known period-23 oscillator and the first new oscillator period in over half a decade.
• Cheap still life syntheses (by Tanner Jacobi, Goldtiger997, Jeremy Tan, Adam P. Goucher, et al.): significant improvements in glider construction costs for small still lifes, including all 17-cell still lifes in at most 16 gliders and all 18-cell still lifes in at most 38 gliders.
• Spider syntheses (by Martin Grant, Goldtiger997, et al.): the first synthesis - and subsequent reductions - of a c/5 spaceship. Spider is the largest elementary spaceship so far synthesized.
• 47575M and relatives (by Adam P. Goucher): a record-breaking non-switch-engine-based methuselah.
• Remini (by Michael Simkin): a universal constructor based puffer made purely with period-30 technology.
• Dueling banjos and gun (by Apple Bottom, Tanner Jacobi, and Matthias Merzenich): a new period-24 oscillator and resulting compact p24 gun.
• New p13 sparkers [1], [2] (by Aidan F. Pierce and Bullet51): period-13 sparkers that can support a number of interactions including p13 wicks, p13 bumpers, and p26 oscillators.
• Mountain range patterns (by Dean Hickerson): complex glider interactions that result in emergent shapes with the appearance of mountain ranges.
• Stably supported cyclotron gun (by Goldtiger997, Paul Callahan, and Adam P. Goucher): a gun based on Dean Hickerson's Cyclotron using only stable components for support.
• Knightwave stabilization (by Matthias Merzenich and Adam P. Goucher): the first known extensible (2,1)c/6 spaceship.
• 230P8 (by Arie Paap and Bullet51): a high-clearance period-8 domino sparker that can support interesting interactions including a period-32 phase-shift oscillator.
• 46P4H1V0 synthesis and gun (by Tanner Jacobi, Martin Grant, and Goldtiger997): The first synthesis and gun for a c/4 orthogonal spaceship.
• R49 (by Entity Valkyrie and Luka Okanishi): a useful compact conduit that interacts with a pre-Herschel.
• New gun designs (by Tanner Jacobi): clever new gun components that allow the reduction of a large number of glider guns in the small guns collection.
• p250 c/10 orthogonal rake (by christoph r.): a c/10 rake with the lowest period so far achieved.
• Systematic survey of small patterns (by Nick Gotts): a systematic survey of all patterns up to 9 cells, as well as a survey of all single-cluster 10-cell patterns resulting in the discovery of two record-breaking 10-cell methuselahs, bunnies 10a and bunnies 10b.
• p49 oscillator (by Martin Grant and Jason Summers): the first known period-49 oscillator that is not a glider loop.
• Slavic (by Pavel Grankovskiy): the current smallest universal-constructor based quadratic growth.
• Scholar (by Andrew J. Wade): the second elementary 2c/7 spaceship. It was discovered with the novel search program LSSS.
• Hackersaw (by Gustone): A logarithmic growth pattern with a sawtooth-like population graph.
• Phoenix agars (by Alex Greason, BlinkerSpawn, Dongook Lee, and Arie Paap): Oscillating patterns living on a period-2 phoenix background that emulate some bounded rule 18 patterns. A more detailed explanation is given here. A nice demonstration of the period-120 variant can be seen here.
• 60-line c/10 printer (by GilGil): an easy-to-use c/10 printer that can copy and print a picture 60 lines tall.
• Stable glider-to-spaceship converters [1], [2], [3] (by Goldtiger997): stable patterns that convert gliders into small synthesizable spaceships (crab, 25P3H1V0.2, and 27P4H1V1).
• 27P4H1V1 synthesis and gun (by Goldtiger997, BlinkerSpawn, and Entity Valkyrie): the first synthesis of 27P4H1V1 and the first gun to fire this spaceship.
• Spaghetti monster eater and Heisenburp (by Martin Grant and Goldtiger997): the first patterns capable of cleanly deleting and detecting without eating a 3c/7 spaceship.
• 99 bottles of beer on the wall (by Michael Simkin): a pattern that prints the song "99 bottles of beer on the wall".
• New mid-period sparkers [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] (by 2718281828, Aidan F. Pierce, Martin Grant, and Dongook Lee): a collection of useful mid-period (6-8) sparkers.

The only thing I didn't do is give credits for the still life syntheses (#02). Who contributed most to that project? I figure we should have a few names and then "et al."

Any comments or corrections? I may not have described some patterns well. If you think you have a better description, please post it here.

I'm summarizing them on User:Testitemqlstudop/POTY2019 Nominations, and that's also where I'm going to conduct the voting, since it's easier for everyone to contribute descriptions there.

I don't think we should hold voting on the wiki, since there are fewer people with wiki accounts and we have to give them permission to edit. I don't think we should have any more barriers to voting than we already do.

As for the ease of adding descriptions, I think I've already done most of the leg-work with my post above. Now we just need some corrections and consensus building. I'm not exactly sure how easily we could resolve differences of opinion through wiki editing.

About the still-life synth credits, a recent News item on the LifeWiki said "Tanner Jacobi, Goldtiger997, and others". Seems like Jeremy Tan and Adam P. Goucher also belong in the short list, since along with their synth contributions, their software infrastructure work made all the rest much more likely to happen.

(That gets into a slippery slope -- Chris Cain contributed the spark search utility, '2718281828' did the database work that made a near-comprehensive list of 3-glider collisions available, and so on -- but we can stop and say "et al" at some point.)

I went back and checked the vote-counting script from last year, and of course it had succumbed to bit-rot due to the forum upgrade that happened this year. Page source for forum posts now includes lots of newline characters where there weren't any before. I've updated the script to version 0.6, and it seems to be back in working order:
Nobody's required to use it, of course, but I'll probably run it as a double-check. It does not do even basic checking that people are not voting twice (either in multiple posts or within a single post) or that the votes are all for valid numbers. It just counts and reports the votes.

I'm hoping that the rules for voting will be stated Very Very Clearly In A Large Red Font at the top of the voting thread -- pound-sign on a new line, pattern number, space, string of one or two or three asterisks, that's it. No creative list formatting or Unicode bullet characters or other silliness needed. Really, it could be so simple...!

dvgrn wrote: ↑

January 30th, 2020, 7:35 am

.
I'm hoping that the rules for voting will be stated Very Very Clearly In A Large Red Font at the top of the voting thread -- pound-sign on a new line, pattern number, space, string of one or two or three asterisks, that's it. No creative list formatting or Unicode bullet characters or other silliness needed. Really, it could be so simple...!

Indeed, it could be so simple...

Impatiently waiting for the effects of your voting,
Newbie Hoobeee

testitemqlstudop wrote: ↑

January 30th, 2020, 4:05 am

I'm summarizing them on User:Testitemqlstudop/POTY2019 Nominations, and that's also where I'm going to conduct the voting, since it's easier for everyone to contribute descriptions there.

Sokwe wrote: ↑

January 30th, 2020, 4:26 am

I don't think we should hold voting on the wiki, since there are fewer people with wiki accounts and we have to give them permission to edit. I don't think we should have any more barriers to voting than we already do.

As for the ease of adding descriptions, I think I've already done most of the leg-work with my post above. Now we just need some corrections and consensus building. I'm not exactly sure how easily we could resolve differences of opinion through wiki editing.

I agree with Sokwe that a forum thread is a better way to conduct the voting than a wiki page. I could also be the one to create the voting thread if it's inconvenient for others.