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HBK Rake Working Notes
Posted: July 20th, 2020, 7:13 pm
by RakeGuy1246
After seeing someone else construct a HBK gun using the parallel HBK synthesis, I want to build an HBK Rake using the same synthesis, but may run into a few problems. One of the ones that gets removed with a rake is that I don't have to delay anything in the design, since it moves, but at the same time, other problems arise such as: how am I gonna build the half bakeries without others getting in the way, how do I start the newly-created HBKs once they're finished? I mean, I can obviously just run gliders into the machine through a set of perfectly-timed rakes so that the gliders get into the right positions, but then other things would get in the way of those rakes and, you can see the problem there.
Re: HBK Rake Working Notes
Posted: July 20th, 2020, 7:17 pm
by dvgrn
RakeGuy1246 wrote: ↑July 20th, 2020, 7:13 pm
After seeing someone else construct a HBK gun using the parallel HBK synthesis, I want to build an HBK Rake using the same synthesis, but may run into a few problems. One of the ones that gets removed with a rake is that I don't have to delay anything in the design, since it moves, but at the same time, other problems arise such as: how am I gonna build the half bakeries without others getting in the way, how do I start the newly-created HBKs once they're finished? I mean, I can obviously just run gliders into the machine through a set of perfectly-timed rakes so that the gliders get into the right positions, but then other things would get in the way of those rakes and, you can see the problem there.
Do you want an actual rake, or is a tethered rake good enough? Do you care what speed the rake would travel at?
Re: HBK Rake Working Notes
Posted: July 20th, 2020, 7:31 pm
by RakeGuy1246
dvgrn wrote: ↑July 20th, 2020, 7:17 pm
RakeGuy1246 wrote: ↑July 20th, 2020, 7:13 pm
After seeing someone else construct a HBK gun using the parallel HBK synthesis, I want to build an HBK Rake using the same synthesis, but may run into a few problems. One of the ones that gets removed with a rake is that I don't have to delay anything in the design, since it moves, but at the same time, other problems arise such as: how am I gonna build the half bakeries without others getting in the way, how do I start the newly-created HBKs once they're finished? I mean, I can obviously just run gliders into the machine through a set of perfectly-timed rakes so that the gliders get into the right positions, but then other things would get in the way of those rakes and, you can see the problem there.
Do you want an actual rake, or is a tethered rake good enough? Do you care what speed the rake would travel at?
An actual rake, and really just slow enough to make timings easier, but not too slow, so it isn't tedious.
Re: HBK Rake Working Notes
Posted: July 21st, 2020, 7:10 am
by dvgrn
RakeGuy1246 wrote: ↑July 20th, 2020, 7:31 pm
An actual rake, and really just slow enough to make timings easier, but not too slow, so it isn't tedious.
I asked because a tethered rake would be quite a bit easier -- basically just the four loops of the original HBK gun, plus a fifth loop with the same period that shoots down four Snarks during a lull in the action, and rebuilds them a little farther away.
I hope you aren't thinking about placing individual rakes for all 38380 gliders in the HBK recipe, or 57286 gliders depending on which recipe you're looking at. That might take years to construct manually, and even an automatic assembly script might have a tough time unless it was very cleverly written. In either case, the completed pattern would be so huge that nobody would have enough patience to watch it through even one full construction cycle (because one cycle in Golly might take months, similar to an
0E0P metacell).
A slow HBK rake that runs in a reasonable amount of time
could be built, I think. Again it would be a matter of designing something that could shoot down Snarks and rebuild them at an offset -- this time at all four corners of each rectangular loop, while HBK recipe gliders were cycling in the loop. I'm not sure if it makes more sense to have one loop containing all five streams of gliders somehow, or four separate loops each able to move itself and emit a glider stream, or a separate fifth loop that moves itself and the other four loops but doesn't emit any recipe gliders.
It's an interesting engineering problem, but not at all a trivial one. It might be easier to just recompile an HBK with slsparse, to get a
single-channel recipe for it, and work from there.
Re: HBK Rake Working Notes
Posted: July 21st, 2020, 12:31 pm
by RakeGuy1246
dvgrn wrote: ↑July 21st, 2020, 7:10 am
RakeGuy1246 wrote: ↑July 20th, 2020, 7:31 pm
An actual rake, and really just slow enough to make timings easier, but not too slow, so it isn't tedious.
I asked because a tethered rake would be quite a bit easier -- basically just the four loops of the original HBK gun, plus a fifth loop with the same period that shoots down four Snarks during a lull in the action, and rebuilds them a little farther away.
I hope you aren't thinking about placing individual rakes for all 38380 gliders in the HBK recipe, or 57286 gliders depending on which recipe you're looking at. That might take years to construct manually, and even an automatic assembly script might have a tough time unless it was very cleverly written. In either case, the completed pattern would be so huge that nobody would have enough patience to watch it through even one full construction cycle (because one cycle in Golly might take months, similar to an
0E0P metacell).
A slow HBK rake that runs in a reasonable amount of time
could be built, I think. Again it would be a matter of designing something that could shoot down Snarks and rebuild them at an offset -- this time at all four corners of each rectangular loop, while HBK recipe gliders were cycling in the loop. I'm not sure if it makes more sense to have one loop containing all five streams of gliders somehow, or four separate loops each able to move itself and emit a glider stream, or a separate fifth loop that moves itself and the other four loops but doesn't emit any recipe gliders.
It's an interesting engineering problem, but not at all a trivial one. It might be easier to just recompile an HBK with slsparse, to get a
single-channel recipe for it, and work from there.
I wasn't planning on shooting gliders for EVERY individual part. For example, the half bakeries could be built using a singular rake shooting over and over again, with a line of gliders timed perfectly enough to block a half-bakery from being formed in proper places. The line of gliders, after the perfect timing is found, could then be shot out by another rake with in-built double glider block reactions to remove extraneous gliders that aren't part of the original glider stream. The half-bakeries can be built in layers like that, but I'm not sure how to handle the blinkers at the end of the parallel HBK, or sending in the needed gliders to make the HBK work after the framework and all of that is constructed.