ConwayLife.com

Hi All,

As I posted earlier, I'm writing documentation for a project I'm finishing up, and it includes a small library of simple patterns, for which I'd like to give credit to their creators. LifeWiki has been a terrific source, but I've noticed a few small gaps (unknown creators, dates, etc.). Given the amazing responses I received to my last post, I thought I'd ask about these here just in case anyone does happen to have additional info. I assume that many of you are the very people who are maintaining the wiki, so it's a bit of a long-shot, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to see if anything on this list jogs anyone's memory, and I'll be happy to update the wiki with anything I learn.

1. The discoverer and date of the Blinker Fuse are unknown.
2. The page for 98P25 includes a pattern, P105P25, that replaces half the pattern with a toaster. I used this latter pattern, but I can't figure out who to credit for it. Or is that replacement so obvious that I should just credit the discoverers of 98P25?
3. The discovery date of the Buckaroo is unknown.
4. The discovery date of the Pi portraitor is unknown ("1984 or 1985").
5. The discoverer and date of the Pentadecathlon on snacker are unknown. Should I just credit the discoverers of the two separate patterns? I used the symmetrical "alternate form", and I can't actually tell whether that variant is non-trivial.
6. The discovery date of the p56 B-heptomino shuttle is unknown ("before May 1991").
7. The page for 64P2H1V0 states that this is "the smallest period 2 spaceship". Should that say "smallest known", or has this actually been proven to be the smallest? It seems like a large pattern for such a thing to have been proven.

Having spent quite a bit of time on the wiki recently, I can report that there are lot of dead links to .rle and .cells files. I'll try to fix some up at some point.

I don't have any more information on any of these questions, but ...

PaulKwiatkowski wrote: ↑

February 27th, 2022, 11:44 pm

Having spent quite a bit of time on the wiki recently, I can report that there are lot of dead links to .rle and .cells files. I'll try to fix some up at some point.

... don't worry about the missing files. They fix themselves more or less automatically when I run the auto-upload script -- which I haven't done for several months, for various reasons, but I will do it soon.

Uploads to the patterns collection aren't done through the usual wiki-based methods -- there's a separate file-maintenance system that just a scattering of people have access to.

The auto-upload script takes a long time to run now, and is prone to random connection errors nine tenths of the way through that crash the script and lose all of the accumulated data. I just tried adding some retry logic, but that just broke things worse... so for now I'm running just one-sixth of the analysis at a time. Will get the pattern collection caught up to the current RLE:{pname} reality in the next week or so.