Template talk:Conduit

To clarify, "recovery time" will record the safe recovery time, right? -- i.e., the smallest number of ticks after which a signal can safely come in at any time? Whereas the best recovery time accounts for special situations like overclocking, like 74 or 75 ticks best recovery time for a syringe, vs. 78 for the plain "recovery time".

Re: "dependent" vs. "independent" -- we did put a definition for "independent conduit" into the new Life Lexicon, but it has never really been the primary category. So "Dependent conduit? Yes" just seems more like the right way to convey the category membership, as opposed to "Independent conduit? No".

As the Lexicon now mentions, dependent conduits don't really depend on anything, though other conduits depend on them (to suppress the first natural glider). They should probably have been called "dependable conduits", or "FNG-suppressing conduits", or something like that -- but it kinda seems like it's Too Late Now. Dvgrn (talk) 01:43, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

"Recovery time" and "best recovery time" are just the numbers that the Lexicon gives, yes. So for, say F116, when the Lexicon says that "[i]ts recovery time is 138 ticks; this can be reduced to 120 ticks by adding extra mechanisms to suppress the internal glider, that means the template should record a recovery time of 138 ticks and a "best" recovery time of 120 ticks.

I don't know if "recovery time" and "best recovery time" are the ideal names for these. But the infobox text and template documentation can be adjusted as necessary/desired, of course -- I'll leave that in your capable hands, since unlike me you actually have extensive knowledge of conduits and related technology --, and at this point it's also still very easy to change the names of the template parameters. (Not that it'll ever be hard to do so, it'll just get tedious.)

Good point re: "dependent" vs. "independent", I'll change that.

And "dependable" (or "robust", or something along those lines) might've been a better name, yes. Is it too late to change what these are called? I don't know; maybe we could introduce a new alternative name ("dependent conduits, also called dependable or robust conduits, ...") and then gently nudge people to that name, hoping that it'll catch on. :)

On that note, I've been holding off on creating the supporting category infrastructure for conduits so far, to avoid creating, deleting, de-deleting, re-deleting and de-re-deleting categories as we tweak things. I'll build these once the template has stabilized.

Oh, and lest I forget -- how should the population and bounding box of conduits be counted, with or without the (input) Herschel and/or (output) ghost Herschel? Right now I've been removing the latter but not the former (probably the most confusing choice of all, now that I'm thinking about it).

Apple Bottom (talk) 11:48, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

It's hard to come up with recovery-time labels that are short and to the point, and convey all the information, and don't end up adding a lot of confusing clutter for the majority of conduits that don't have special cases. There are at least three different special cases:

1) conduits that work for all periods >=N, and a few special-case periods below that (e.g., syringe: recovery time 78, special cases 74 and 75)

2) conduits that work in their simple form for all periods >=N, and can be modified to reduce that minimum to M (e.g., F116: recovery time >=138, special case >=120 with added oscillator)

2b) conduits that work in their simple form for all periods >=N, and can be modified to reduce that minimum to M, but it reduces the conduit's functionality (e.g., Fx77: recovery time >=61, special case >=61 if FNG suppressed with fishhook eater, >=57 if FNG suppressed by 7x9 eater or equivalent, >=51 if FNG suppressed by incoming glider -- Fx119 also has several possible nontrivial modifications like this)

3) conduits that work in their simple form for all periods >=N, and can be overclocked at various lower periods (e.g., a Silver reflector: recovery time 497, but overclocking works starting at period 100 and 101 for 5x overclocking, and progressively wider ranges for 4x, 3x, and 2x overclocking.)

Bounding box should probably be without the input Herschel, but it's not really a very interesting measurement and my vote would be to leave it out of the infobox altogether. The problem is that a conduit obsessively optimized for bounding box is going to have a bigger population, and may be needlessly complicated-looking where the actual conduit is Spartan. Hersrch has several Fx77 variants along these lines -- they did occasionally come in handy for auto-constructing smaller Herschel loop guns.

However, the extra rows or columns saved to make a smaller bounding box may actually add cells in places that prevent the conduit from connecting to other conduits. Connectability is really much more important, seeing as the act of connecting is going to extend the bounding box anyway. Dvgrn (talk) 14:02, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Re: "dependable" or "robust" or whatever, this is just my opinion, but I suspect that creating a new term not in common use, to compete with an already well-known term, is just likely to cause confusion at this point. Anyone not in on the terminological plot will think that a dependable conduit must be something new and different from the old-standard dependent conduits. Let's mostly stay out of the neologism business and just document existing terms as people use them. Dvgrn (talk) 14:35, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Well spoken. Let's do that (i.e. not add neologisms)! Apple Bottom (talk) 17:13, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

As for the rest--

The situation re: recovery times sounds complicated. Would it perhaps be best to not try to stuff all this information into the infobox, instead just listing the "regular" recovery time (of the simple form of the conduit) there, and putting extra information on modifications and improved recovery times into the article text?

Removing bounding box information from the infobox seems sensible, then. What about population? I suppose it populations the "patterns with $POPULATION cells" categories if nothing else. Apple Bottom (talk) 17:18, 13 January 2018 (UTC)