otismo wrote: ↑September 15th, 2024, 4:57 am
... is there an "Official" Puffer thread, for future reference ?
I don't know of one. Puffers are one of those "dime a dozen" categories where it's possible to generate literally millions of them very quickly, but none of them are necessarily any more interesting than any of the others. From long experience, we try not to maintain threads that have the potential to collect millions of not-particularly-interesting posts. It would be the CA equivalent of a forum thread dedicated to text strings that contain the letter "A".
So, in general, puffers should probably just be posted somewhere like the
Construction practice thread, or some existing thread in the Sandbox, so that people know not to expect anything particularly ground-breaking. Only puffers with some really unusual purpose or special feature are going to be of much interest to the community -- and those are so rare that they haven't even needed a dedicated thread.
otismo wrote: ↑September 15th, 2024, 4:57 am
Are
Factory Flotillas like this technically Puffers ?
I found the Pattern in the Puffer Directory in Golly...
The original version of the pattern was almost a standard linear-growth puffer -- if you ignore the Herschel that was added to demonstrate the growing Herschel conduit.
With the Herschel, you could maybe call the pattern a "growing puffer" by analogy with
growing spaceship. Growing puffers are a slightly more limited category, but it's still easy to generate millions of them -- analogous to text strings that contain the letter "A" always followed immediately by the letter "B". They're not quite exactly standard puffers, but it still isn't clear why it's interesting to pay attention to them.
Once you start generating a regular stream of Herschels to feed the conduit, you've got a quadratic-growth pattern -- a breeder, as LucasBrown says. No, for sure, it's not just a puffer any more. It still contains a puffer, but that's no longer a good description of the whole pattern ... just like you wouldn't call a car a "front bumper".