This apparent limit leads to a new idea: using sliding block memory, it should be possible to create a universal computer whose every component is bounded below a certain population, (albiet significantly expanding computation time). You could do this using a setup such as, say, a minsky machine emulating a universal TM.
Obviously, now the question is now to construct such a machine, or another alternative which also has a population bounded under a constant.
One alternative is to use a sliding block memory described on the discord by Calcyman:
Using this method, you could time how long the glider gets back to figure out the state of the block without having to, say, count how many times it must be pulled by your minsky machine setup, which would dramatically improve the flop-per-steppage of the setup.apgoucher wrote:you can use a variant of sliding block memory which sends a return glider.
So, tl;dr: The challenge of this project is to create a universal computer/constructor whose population (not counting what it may be constructing) is bounded under a constant number, say, 10^9.
EDIT: magma says:
so yeah but still it would be possible to construct one of these, just slower than I suggestedmagma wrote:this doesn't workMoosey wrote:Using this method, you could time how long the glider gets back to figure out the state of the block without having to, say, count how many times it must be pulled by your minsky machine setup, which would dramatically improve the flop-per-steppage of the setup.
since you can't store the time
except with another sliding block memory which would make the return glider pointless
you still need to use a return glider, namely to trigger the next instruction
because you can't send several pull or push salvos at once without increasing the population
actually you can make do without a return glider, you just need to make sure that each program step is computed sufficiently slower than the previous one
a very cheap option would be to just use a caber tosser as a timer
would make the entire machine exponentially slower though
