Thread for basic questions

testitemqlstudop · Post by **testitemqlstudop** » September 1st, 2019, 6:16 am

It depends on your cpu and hardware, but less than bitcoin mining.

Moosey · Post by **Moosey** » September 2nd, 2019, 6:27 pm

Has anyone thought to look for ships like the copperhead or loafer recently--small+slow ships nobody thought to look for?
Something like a c/17 or something else that would be moderately slow, but slower than any known small-scale ships?

Post by **dvgrn** » September 2nd, 2019, 7:10 pm

Moosey wrote:Has anyone thought to look for ships like the copperhead or loafer recently--small+slow ships nobody thought to look for?
Something like a c/17 or something else that would be moderately slow, but slower than any known small-scale ships?

It's funny that you chose c/17. That's only one away from the classic hypothetical c/18 spaceship -- it's like you're channeling muzik from a few years ago.

My long answer then looked like this. Read a few posts down for an estimate of search time for period 14, then add ten more zeroes (or maybe a hundred, depending on your assumptions) to get to period 17.

Short answer: yes, a number of people have definitely thought to look, but fewer people have actually done much looking.

There don't seem to be all that many people willing to devote actual months or years of CPU time to probably-hopeless searches. I think Sokwe's page on the LifeWiki is a pretty good summary of what searches have actually been done. The rows in these tables give some rough indication of what people with lots of experience in spaceship-searching think is the outer edge of what might be vaguely worth trying. Notice there's nothing above period 10, let alone period 14 or 17 or 18 or 26.

It's absolutely possible that some search utility, set up in just the right way, will have a stroke of incredible luck and return a tiny c/17 ship after just a few minutes of searching. It just doesn't seem terribly likely. After someone leaves their computer running for a few weeks or months or years, on searches that are guaranteed not to complete before the Sun swallows the Earth and/or burns out ... well, enthusiasm starts to wane a little bit.

That just means that these kinds of searches will have to be done by whoever is still enthusiastic about running them!

Moosey · Post by **Moosey** » September 2nd, 2019, 7:53 pm

Would it be plausible, though, to run a quick search for small ships across many speeds and eliminate all within a slightly-larger-than-a-copperhead-sized bounding box in a reasonable amount of time?

EDIT:

dvgrn wrote:muzik from a few years ago

Classical muzik

Post by **dvgrn** » September 2nd, 2019, 9:30 pm

Moosey wrote:Would it be plausible, though, to run a quick search for small ships across many speeds and eliminate all within a slightly-larger-than-a-copperhead-sized bounding box in a reasonable amount of time?

Vaguely plausible, sure. Except we might already have covered the speeds and sizes for which this kind of thing can be done.

You might eliminate all the bilaterally symmetric spaceships up to c/10 up to a little over Copperhead size, for example, but I think that's been done already. As you increase the period, each search is a thousand or a million times harder to complete than the last one, at the same size... so you have to shrink the bounding box fairly quickly if you want to keep running searches that will complete in your lifetime.

Otherwise you can't actually eliminate anything useful, unless you want to start keeping track of having completed "the first 0.00000000001% of a standard {pick your program} search for [bilaterally symmetric/short wide/long skinny/blobby] c/14 spaceships". Up to a certain size, maybe 7x7 with a clever distributed search, we could eventually run all possible configurations through apgsearch/Catagolue and see if anything comes out with any speed. But above that size it's hard to see how to definitely eliminate things with periods above 10 or 12 or so.

The counterintuitive thing is that making a search utility that's a million times more efficient, or a computer that's a million times faster, doesn't really get you very much farther in this kind of search. If we can eliminate a Copperhead-sized c/11 spaceship with a month-long search now (let's say), then after this big hypothetical factor-of-a-million improvement you _might_ be able to eliminate a Copperhead-sized c/12 spaceship with a month-long search. But then that's it. It almost instantly feels like you're right back where you started... and c/17 is still just about as far out of reach as it was before.

wildmyron · Post by **wildmyron** » September 2nd, 2019, 11:19 pm

I believe Moosey was specifically asking about doing an apgsearch type search. Various such searches have been done, but I don't know up to what size bounding box. David Eppstein wrote gsearch for this purpose, and various other similar searches have been run by others.

Moosey · Post by **Moosey** » September 5th, 2019, 5:35 pm

What is the smallest CC reflector?

EDIT:
Are there any conduits that can attach to this and eventually to a block factory?