Dylan Chen wrote: ↑April 2nd, 2021, 3:39 am
My question is: Does this reveal the boundary of CGoL universe?
From 16x16 soups, you can go at most 288k ticks.
Interesting! Thanks for doing this analysis.
Back in 2009, when
TOLLCASS was active, I did the same kind of analysis on somewhat sparser data, and came up with an estimated upper limit of 400,000 ticks ... but those were 20x20 soups. I think it's been shown that larger soups will last proportionally longer on average, but this estimate for an upper limit for 20x20 is the only hard statistic I have to back that up at the moment. I wonder if it's possible to add on messless32, megasized32, and methuselah32 categories for apgsearch/Catagolue, for 32x32 soups.
As soup sizes increase, eventually the search space will be large enough that long-tail methuselahs will exist, with times in the millions or billions or trillions of ticks -- probably with a mechanism like
this recent soup discovery, but with the required one or two or three additional synchronized gliders generated by the crystal growth and decay mechanism, that are needed to shoot down the switch engines that are producing the backwards gliders that generate the crystal.
It's very hard to estimate how often this will happen, mostly because we don't know what the cheapest backward-firing switch-engine group is that can be stopped by gliders along the edges of their debris trails -- I think the example above probably
can't be stopped with forward-firing gliders. So we're in completely unknown territory:
Is there a backward-firing switch-engine pair that can be stopped completely by a single glider? Or will it take three synchronized switch engines and a synchronized glider, or two switch engines and two synchronized gliders? Or is the most likely high-tick eventual-stop mechanism actually something entirely different from this?