Thread for basic questions

[praosylen]

Hat:

Code: Select all

x = 5, y = 4, rule = B3/S23
2bo$bobo$bobo$2ob2o!

Sesquihat:

Code: Select all

x = 7, y = 5, rule = B3/S23
2bo$bobob2o$bobobo$2obobo$4bo!

Twin hat:

Code: Select all

x = 9, y = 5, rule = B3/S23
2bo3bo$bobobobo$bobobobo$2obobob2o$4bo!

???

Code: Select all

x = 11, y = 5, rule = B3/S23
2bo3bo$bobobobob2o$bobobobobo$2obobobobo$4bo3bo!

"Sesterhat", maybe?

[77topaz]

The very act of asking who found an object is sufficient to make the first few hauls, if they haven't already been deleted, permanent. You're correct that there is no automatic process for attributing non-b3s23 hauls.

I see. So, how did that blue haul appear in that non-b3s23 rule, then? And, if I understand it correctly, is a discovery in b3s23 only credited if someone calls the attribute function on the object before its hauls are deleted?

[calcyman]

The very act of asking who found an object is sufficient to make the first few hauls, if they haven't already been deleted, permanent. You're correct that there is no automatic process for attributing non-b3s23 hauls.

I see. So, how did that blue haul appear in that non-b3s23 rule, then? And, if I understand it correctly, is a discovery in b3s23 only credited if someone calls the attribute function on the object before its hauls are deleted?

Let me clarify:

• Calling /attribute causes relevant hauls to become blue if they haven't yet been deleted.
• Anyone can call /attribute on any object in any rule.
• For b3s23, there are also two automatic processes which call /attribute, namely Catagolue itself and Ivan's twitterbot.

[KittyTac]

Has anyone done an in-depth analysis of W110, its common particles, and their interactions, etc? If not, I will do it.

[77topaz]

Has anyone done an in-depth analysis of W110, its common particles, and their interactions, etc? If not, I will do it.

Yeah, it has even been proven universal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

[M. I. Wright]

And owing to this, W110 is really the most likely rule to have already been explored in depth.

[KittyTac]

I meant descriptions of common spaceships, their speeds, etc. May make that one.

[Saka]

I meant descriptions of common spaceships, their speeds, etc. May make that one.

Those are done too
http://delta.cs.cinvestav.mx/~mcintosh/ ... LE110.html
http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/genaro/rule110/ ... le110.html

[KittyTac]

Are natural LWSS more commonly synthesized from gliders or are they more commonly born from the soup itself?

[gameoflifemaniac]

Are natural LWSS more commonly synthesized from gliders or are they more commonly born from the soup itself?

It would be extremely rare that the gliders will form just in the right position to create an LWSS. Before you ask questions like these, first try to answer it yourself, OK?

[77topaz]

Before you ask questions like these, first try to answer it yourself, OK?

That's a bit of a condescending thing to say - this is the "thread for basic questions", after all.

[KittyTac]

Though last time I saw a natural LWSS in a 500x500 soup, it appeared 400 generations in!

[dvgrn]

Though last time I saw a natural LWSS in a 500x500 soup, it appeared 400 generations in!

Occasionally you do see two gliders hitting each other as a random soup evolves, but three coordinated gliders is rare enough that I'm not sure I've ever seen an example.

My intuition may be totally wrong on this, but I would be somewhat surprised if any of the 28 billion LWSSes that have showed up so far from 16x16 Catagolue soups, were generated by three colliding gliders in the classic clean recipe. There are just so many more likely ways for a soup to produce LWSSes. Gliders moving through the middle of stabilizing ash are pretty rare in the first place, and here you'd need three of them at once _and_ the LWSS would have to be lucky enough to have an escape route afterwards.

I suppose the question is at least somewhat within reach of a ballpark estimate. Could survey a lot of soups and see what the probability is, say in soups that last over 1000 ticks, that any given point in the pattern contains a glider in a specific orientation. The odds of a natural LWSS recipe should be on the order of the cube of that probability.

So... since it seems pretty clear that the odds are less than one in 3000 that a randomly-chosen spacetime location in stabilizing soup contains, say, a phase-0 SW-traveling glider... it looks like apgsearch very likely hasn't seen its first natural LWSS recipe yet.

[KittyTac]

What is the largest spaceship archive?

[wildmyron]

What is the largest spaceship archive?

I don't think that anyone has compiled one bigger than the updated jslife collection: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2031&start=500#p50444

[77topaz]

And for OCA, it's probably David Eppstein's glider database.

[Koiti Kimura]

Let me ask you all a fool basic question since I am still a mere/sheer novice/beginner in this field/discipline: does the existence of gliders mean the existence of gliders-guns? If not, which kinds of gliders are accompanied/produced by gliders-guns?

[Saka]

Let me ask you all a fool basic question since I am still a mere/sheer novice/beginner in this field/discipline: does the existence of gliders mean the existence of gliders-guns? If not, which kinds of gliders are accompanied/produced by gliders-guns?

Pretty much any spaceship that has a Synthesis has a gun. I'm not sure where most of the guns for different ships are located but you can check out Category:Guns

[dvgrn]

Let me ask you all a fool basic question since I am still a mere/sheer novice/beginner in this field/discipline: does the existence of gliders mean the existence of gliders-guns? If not, which kinds of gliders are accompanied/produced by gliders-guns?

Pretty much any spaceship that has a Synthesis has a gun. I'm not sure where most of the guns for different ships are located but you can check out Category:Guns

There are explosive rules -- not sure what a good example might be, maybe Brian's Brain or Star Wars or Seeds? -- where there are lots of gliders all over the place, but it's hard to get anything to stand still long enough to be a gun. So I think gliders don't necessarily imply glider guns.

Maybe someone can dig up a really boring super-explosive rule that has a glider or two, but everything else is provably a spacefiller?

[KittyTac]

Is it possible in rule tables to make certain states react only on generations that are a multiple of 2, 3, etc, while using one state? I want to make a very complicated CA and want to conserve the amount of states, both for faster simulation and because there is a limit of 256 states.

[dvgrn]

Is it possible in rule tables to make certain states react only on generations that are a multiple of 2, 3, etc, while using one state?

Not that I can think of. You'd have to use double, triple, etc., the number of states, and have states 1 through N appear only on even generations and states N+1 to 2N appear on odd generations, or the equivalent, with different rules for each group of states as appropriate.

(Not sure if you could get away without an alternate zero state -- depends on the rule you want, I think. If you need different behavior for the zero state depending on generation, then you might end up being stuck with bounded universes, or Golly's standard weird behavior at the boundaries.)

[KittyTac]

Is it possible in rule tables to make certain states react only on generations that are a multiple of 2, 3, etc, while using one state?

Not that I can think of. You'd have to use double, triple, etc., the number of states, and have states 1 through N appear only on even generations and states N+1 to 2N appear on odd generations, or the equivalent, with different rules for each group of states as appropriate.

(Not sure if you could get away without an alternate zero state -- depends on the rule you want, I think. If you need different behavior for the zero state depending on generation, then you might end up being stuck with bounded universes, or Golly's standard weird behavior at the boundaries.)

Made a suggestion to allow us to arbitrarily increase the number of states.

[wildmyron]

Is it possible in rule tables to make certain states react only on generations that are a multiple of 2, 3, etc, while using one state? I want to make a very complicated CA and want to conserve the amount of states, both for faster simulation and because there is a limit of 256 states.

No, it is not possible in Golly. I think modification of the ruletable code in Golly to introduce this is feasible, but perhaps you should consider a custom simulator for what you want to do: Golly is extremely good at simulating 2-state CA on small neighbourhoods and ruletables allow an extraordinary variety of rules to be explored, but some things are just much easier to express in a declarative language. For example, a step function can easily use whatever neighbourhood you provide it; it can be generation dependent, or cell location dependent; and you can easily count neighbour states or use arithmetic to calculate intermediate values. I don't know what platform to suggest here, it depends on what you are trying to do.

[KittyTac]

Is it possible in rule tables to make certain states react only on generations that are a multiple of 2, 3, etc, while using one state? I want to make a very complicated CA and want to conserve the amount of states, both for faster simulation and because there is a limit of 256 states.

No, it is not possible in Golly. I think modification of the ruletable code in Golly to introduce this is feasible, but perhaps you should consider a custom simulator for what you want to do: Golly is extremely good at simulating 2-state CA on small neighbourhoods and ruletables allow an extraordinary variety of rules to be explored, but some things are just much easier to express in a declarative language. For example, a step function can easily use whatever neighbourhood you provide it; it can be generation dependent, or cell location dependent; and you can easily count neighbour states or use arithmetic to calculate intermediate values. I don't know what platform to suggest here, it depends on what you are trying to do.

I run Windows, and I am broke and cannot really buy a new PC to run Mac or Linux or whatever. I may make a separate program, though.

[dvgrn]

I run Windows, and I am broke and cannot really buy a new PC to run Mac or Linux or whatever. I may make a separate program, though.

Golly has everything you need to do the kind of simulations you're describing -- you just can't do it natively with a single rule table.

I'd say it's not too likely that Golly will be updated to allow more than 256 states in the near future -- it's just too convenient and efficient to be able to store the state of each cell in a lowest-level hashtile as a single byte. At least, changing that would be more of a headache than I would want to tackle, given that Golly with that modification might not perform nearly as well -- RuleLoader would presumably run out of memory quicker.

Rules that need more than 256 states seem to be relatively few and far between, anyway... and if they're complicated enough, like a rule running nine independent Life universes simultaneously, then there are way too many rule lines needed in practice and Golly can't run the rule well anyway.

For the case you mention -- states that should only become active every N ticks -- just write two separate rule tables RuleA and RuleB, plus a Lua script that switches to RuleA and runs N-1 ticks, then switches to RuleB and runs 1 tick, and repeats that until you hit Escape.

You can add support in the script for higher step sizes or other standard Golly functionality, depending on what you need. See heisenburp.lua, which does some similar kinds of event handling to allow different speeds and reset options and so on, without leaving the script.