Talk:Period-143 glider gun

I cannot see how the topic deserves its own LifeWiki page (sure, there is an interesting oscillator and a couple of fixed-period guns at the period, but the other adjustable-period once-record-holding Herschel/glider loops are mundane), and now I am slipping to worry about the future where LifeWiki would be bloated with a large quantity of similar "period-xxx glider gun" pages and patterns where xxx is a period well above repeat times of common adjustable stable conduits and for which no fixed-period gun is known, detering potential new readers from thorough browsing and/or potential editors from general maintaining. GUYTU6J (talk) 09:17, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

I think it started when I created the period-117 glider gun page last year despite it being my own discovery. When a tiny p126 gun was found by me and others (it's still the smallest), I decided not to create a page because there would be too many of them. However, the p117 page has a difference, and that it's about the period-specific mechanism. HotdogPi (talk) 14:27, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

• I think period 126 also deserves a page, where the current smallest gun is shown. The corresponding Herschel track from guns1j is 112 × 62, so I would show it as well. I did not search for intermediate record holders / other interesting guns for that period. Confocal (talk) 18:36, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

To directly address the "worry about the future": I'm not going to create pages for periods where all known guns are based on universal period-independent approaches (Herschel tracks / glider loops / syringe / speed tunnel). Confocal (talk) 16:14, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Every small period with at least one known interesting gun deserves its own page "period-N glider gun" with a historical overview and with the guns. A viable alternative would be to put every single notable gun on its own separate dedicated page and make "period-N glider gun" a short overview -- the only problem I can see with that possibility is the lack of a simple way to assign unique short human-readable identifiers to individual glider guns, so that it is easy to understand how to name the dedicated page for each of them. Assigning the generic label "period-N glider gun" to just one of all known period-N glider guns is problematic, which can be seen in pages beginning with something like "Period-N glider gun is a true period N gun discovered by (person) on (date)." -- to the left is a generic label, to the right is one specific particular gun. Confocal (talk) 16:14, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

For syringe-based once-smallest guns specifically, I see these possibilities: (a) show every once-smallest syringe-based gun in a separate viewer; (b) show all once-smallest syringe-based guns combined in a single viewer; (c) show only the last (once-)smallest syringe-based gun and still mention all incremental improvements in text. Personally I do not like (b) because it is non-obvious what is a simple straightforward way to arrange several non-interacting guns in a single RLE, short of arranging them in a single row (which would be too wide). Probably (c) would be better than (a) when there are too many distinguishable incremental improvements. In this case, I could find only four syringe-based once-smallest guns, hence I decided to show them all. Confocal (talk) 16:14, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

I think all incremental improvements should at least be mentioned in text, and at least all "interesting" guns should be shown. I think the respective Herschel track based gun from Dieter and Peter's glider gun collection should be shown (whenever the period has a dedicated page at all), unless the track is too large to be shown. An example where the Herschel loop gun is also small and interesting is period-256 glider gun. Confocal (talk) 16:14, 30 November 2022 (UTC)