Glider synthesis on LifeWiki

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GUYTU6J
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Glider synthesis on LifeWiki

Post by GUYTU6J » May 30th, 2022, 8:31 am

Here are some ambitious plans concerning how individual glider syntheses are stored and introduced on LifeWiki.
1)If you look at Special:WantedPages, you will see that many items after #733 are of the form RLE:<pname> synth. It means there are a lot of wanted synthesis RLE pages, regardless of whether or not a corresponding pattern have already been uploaded to conwaylife.com/patterns server. To clean up these red links, we need to create pages in bulk...
... but what pattern to choose? Mark Niemiec's database is outdated while Catagolue storage shows only one optimized result.
2)Thanks to muzik/AwesoMan3000, we now have a boilerplate template for general uninformative description of individual syntheses, putting every page transcluding it into a tracking category that asks for further information. It received complaint since inception and I talked that in the category talk page, but it seems to be stuck on LifeWiki demanding sizable amount of attention. We need to invite Mark Niemiec and Heinrich Koenig to take some time passing their knowledge to these articles including
  • The discoverer and date of progressively reduced and other important glider syntheses,
  • The relevant starting materials and components, and
  • Special-purpose syntheses, especially good-clearance edge-shooters.
Are they feasible?

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dvgrn
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Re: Glider synthesis on LifeWiki

Post by dvgrn » May 30th, 2022, 11:18 am

GUYTU6J wrote:
May 30th, 2022, 8:31 am
Here are some ambitious plans concerning how individual glider syntheses are stored and introduced on LifeWiki.
1)If you look at Special:WantedPages, you will see that many items after #733 are of the form RLE:<pname> synth. It means there are a lot of wanted synthesis RLE pages, regardless of whether or not a corresponding pattern have already been uploaded to conwaylife.com/patterns server. To clean up these red links, we need to create pages in bulk...
I can write something that does bulk page creation, once we figure out exactly what should be on the pages.
GUYTU6J wrote:
May 30th, 2022, 8:31 am
... but what pattern to choose? Mark Niemiec's database is outdated while Catagolue storage shows only one optimized result.
Some year relatively soon, we'll get a (public) update to Mark's database. In the meantime, I'd say that even an outdated version of one of Mark's stamp collections is very often hugely superior to a copy of the current best single synthesis from Catagolue. It's really useful to have lots of different ways to build the same thing, with different clearances and construction speeds and so on, all collected in one place.

So I'd suggest that if we really want to de-redlink the RLE:<pname> synth pages, we should collect all of the current relevant pages from Mark Niemiec's database and upload those -- or else continue to wait paitently for the next update to appear and do the work then, so that we don't have to re-do everything. Or build something that can be run automatically after the update, I suppose, and semi-automatically bring everything up to date without anyone having to do page-by-page comparisons.

The other alternative is to rework the LifeWiki to admit that glider synthesis tracking has now moved to Catagolue, and just take out the whole collection of uploaded synthesis patterns. But I don't think I want to do that, because Catagolue is terrible at providing the information about alternate syntheses that makes Mark's database so useful.

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confocaloid
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Re: Glider synthesis on LifeWiki

Post by confocaloid » November 4th, 2022, 7:38 pm

At least for "relatively small" syntheses of "relatively small" objects, what about documenting the syntheses of some pattern directly on the dedicated page for that pattern - that is, without touching the RLE namespace at all?

For example, see the current version of this page. Here is another example.

If I read this 2021 post correctly, there should be nothing wrong with putting RLEs of small patterns directly into the embedded viewer template.
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Book
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Re: Glider synthesis on LifeWiki

Post by Book » November 4th, 2022, 8:07 pm

confocaloid wrote:
November 4th, 2022, 7:38 pm
At least for "relatively small" syntheses of "relatively small" objects, what about documenting the syntheses of some pattern directly on the dedicated page for that pattern - that is, without touching the RLE namespace at all?

For example, see the current version of this page. Here is another example.

If I read this 2021 post correctly, there should be nothing wrong with putting RLEs of small patterns directly into the embedded viewer template.
There was a push last year to get rle's replaced by pnames so patterns would be in the wiki collection and there's a maint tracking report for that. However, I agree that smallish syntheses (especially as more and more are being shown in viewers) and other "illustrative" rles may not need to be memorialized in the collection. Seems like a judgment call.
Phil Bookman

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confocaloid
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Re: Glider synthesis on LifeWiki

Post by confocaloid » November 4th, 2022, 8:10 pm

Book wrote:
November 4th, 2022, 8:07 pm
There was a push last year to get rle's replaced by pnames so patterns would be in the wiki collection ...
Can you please provide links to relevant discussions?
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Re: Glider synthesis on LifeWiki

Post by Book » November 4th, 2022, 9:16 pm

confocaloid wrote:
November 4th, 2022, 8:10 pm
Can you please provide links to relevant discussions?
The discussion was sort of scattered around, but here's one post I found: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5443&p=136934&hilit ... er#p136934
Phil Bookman

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