Talk:Dependent reflector
Revision as of 01:51, 4 July 2023 by Dvgrn (talk | contribs) (→"Dependent glider shuttle" proposal: third option for article name: plain "dependent reflector")
More periods
- p29 - https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1177&p=8877&hilit=p29+dependent+reflector#p8860
- p37 - https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=145205#p145205
- p57 (or is it p114?) - https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1437&p=148077&hilit=Dependent+reflector#p148077
- p94? - https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3886&p=72957&hilit=Dependent+reflector#p72957 (may also be some other material to work with in that thread)
Chris857 (talk) 16:06, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
- I also saw https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=533&p=3682&hilit=reflector#p3625 which is a p59 reflector made of herschel tracks, which seems less interesting (and vary unwieldy) to include since the herschel spacing can be adjusted, so it seems less period dependent than the other examples here. Chris857 (talk) 20:08, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
"Dependent glider shuttle" proposal
Just to give my two cents here, "dependent reflector loop" seems to me like a much better name for this article than "dependent glider shuttle". Mainly this is because the patterns being referenced, p26 glider shuttle and p31 glider shuttle, are not actually shuttles and badly need to be renamed. Shuttles go back and forth, not round and round.
The first name was invented by codeholic back in 2014, and the second was just a copycat use of the same term by hotdogPi. Once those naming errors are repaired, it doesn't seem like there's going to be any reason to rename this article. These things really are loops made out of dependent reflectors, and that's a term that's been in use for a long time and is well recognized.
I'll probably give this a day to collect any other thoughts, then go ahead and rename those two non-glider-shuttles and patch up this article appropriately (unless I hear objections). Dvgrn (talk) 19:36, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
- The LifeWiki currently has articles for p60 glider shuttle, p71 glider shuttle, p165 glider shuttle, p49 glider shuttle, p42 glider shuttle, p50 glider shuttle, p26 glider shuttle, p31 glider shuttle, and p59 glider shuttle, and there's a p88 shuttle shown in the Shuttle article.
- The p60, p165, p42, p50, and p88 patterns really are shuttles. The p71, being a 180-degree dependent reflector, is maybe kind of an arguable case. But p49 and p59 just don't look right, any more than the p26 or p31 ones do -- those are clearly glider loops, not back-and-forth shuttles.
- The "p49 glider shuttle" doesn't even use dependent reflectors, so "p49 glider loop" would seem to be a much more appropriate name for that case. Dvgrn (talk) 20:36, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
- I'm the one who proposed the move, so here are my thoughts. The article describes oscillators that are made of dependent reflectors reflecting continuous streams of gliders. The glider streams are not signal streams, and the gliders are not signals, at least not with the "natural" interpretation where the information is encoded by presence or absence of a glider. Of course "dependent reflector" is an established useful term. However, as far as I know "dependent reflector loop" is a newly coined term, and I think it's confusing. I agree with forum posts that the gliders are not actually "looping" -- the dependent reflector does periodically produce new gliders as long as gliders come in, but a "hole" in the input stream doesn't become a "hole" in the output stream so the output stream is not really a continuation of the "loop". The oscillator does look like a loop geometrically, but I'm not sure the proposed term "dependent reflector loop" carries that meaning (without suggesting the wrong picture of a signal loop).
Personally, I like the alternative term "dependent glider shuttle", and (regarding other articles for existing oscillators of this type) I would prefer p26 glider shuttle and p31 glider shuttle to keep their current names. (Likewise for other oscillators of the same type that use dependent reflectors.) Confocal (talk) 20:55, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
- We might need a few tie-breaker opinions to sort this one out, then. I'm still thinking that the application of the word "shuttle" to things that go round and round and not back and forth, was a small mistake by codeholic back in 2014, that got duplicated a few times. It seems like it was a terminological accident, and it's not too late to correct it.
- I'm sympathetic to the idea of these things not being loops either -- at least, not signal loops. They're loops in the sense that a glider in spacetime location X allows (rather than directly causes) a glider to exist somewhat later in time in spacetime location Y ... and there's a chain of locations X, Y, Z, P, D, Q, etc. that lead right back around to X again (after one full trip of the not-quite-signal around the not-exactly-loop. Instead of "glider at Y if and only if glider was at X", we have "glider at Y if glider was at X" but not the converse. Still seems pretty loopy to me.