User talk:Entity Valkyrie 1

LifeViewer

If you might be interested in using LifeViewer for either animated or still images, here's a very quick recent summary of how to do that, from the forums. It seems like it will probably look better than PNG or animated GIF images. The ones you've uploaded recently seem to be a little gray or blurry sometimes -- probably Golly's standard off-white background rather than the LifeWiki's solid white? The best way to get all the LifeViewer syntax right is probably to copy the syntax from an existing article with an infobox that's already in the right category. For example, period-256 glider gun could be used as a basis for your new stub entry period-156 glider gun.

You can copy in the syntax, make the appropriate changes to the infobox attributes, and just keep previewing until it looks right. For inline images not in the infobox, copy the syntax from an article that has embedded LifeViewer images, like buckaroo.

If any questions come up, please ask them -- here or elsewhere! Dvgrn (talk) 11:52, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

The reason of gray of blur is because:

- The PNG were made by screenshotting and cropping the color-inverted gridless Golly pattern.

- The GIF were made from the giffer.lua in Golly, then resized.

I will eventually add the p9 bouncer into the wiki.

Entity Valkyrie (talk) 12:23, 4 October 2018 (EST)

It's possible to change Golly's background color to plain white, in Preferences > Color (different for each algorithm). It would probably make for nicer-looking animated GIFs.

However, we're definitely trying to get away from adding animated GIFs to the LifeWiki, just because it's not easy to get the pattern back out of the GIF again if you want to run it or edit it in Golly. The nice thing about LifeViewer is that you can upload the RLE to a page in the RLE: namespace, and then it becomes available to anyone by just opening the LifeViewer pop-up window and hitting Ctrl+C.

You also save some steps with giffer.lua, resizing, and uploading. And then the resulting images all have the standard LifeWiki pattern style, without any extra effort.

Thanks for all the recent editing work! Dvgrn (talk) 15:58, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

... I will defininity do that. However, I don't know how to use LifeViewer, nor I know how to upload pattern into the .rle . Can anybody tell me? ... Entity Valkyrie (talk) 08:55, 5 October 2018 (EST)

Sure. It's much easier than what you've been doing, once you get used to it.

First I'd like to get your attention for a moment, though. Here's a note I added a few days ago to Simkin Glider Gun Breeder:

----begin quote----

My recommendation would be that you stick with LifeWiki:Pattern pages guidelines:

User-created patterns
Although LifeWiki hopes to expand and catalogue everything there is to know about
the Game of Life, users are generally discouraged from adding patterns that they
themselves constructed, in order to avoid a potential conflict of interest.
There are of course exceptions, such as when the constructed pattern
is of clear notability.

It's a little painful to follow this rule sometimes, especially when you really want something of yours to show up in the LifeWiki and nobody else is stepping up to do the work... but it's probably less painful than getting articles deleted after you've spent the time writing them, on the annoying grounds of "non-notability". Dvgrn (talk) 16:26, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

----end quote----

If you'll check the Recent Changes log, you'll see that I've spent quite a bit of time following along and repairing minor damage. I certainly don't want to revoke your trusted status, since you're pointing out a lot of details that it makes sense to include in the various articles. But could you please slow down the pace a bit, and double-check your edits so that other people won't have to clean up your changes so often?

The Simkin Glider Gun Breeder and the two p165 MWSS guns pretty definitely shouldn't have their own articles. You can move them to your user pages if you want, just don't include links to them from the regular LifeWiki pages. I've added proposed-deletion tags to the articles, so if anyone disagrees about the deletion, they'll be able to speak up about it over the next two weeks.

To try to explain why these patterns don't belong among the "notable" patterns catalogued by the LifeWiki: there are easily thousands of ways to build p165 MWSS guns that are smaller or lower-population than your two discoveries. Imagine if thousands of people each wanted their own discoveries on the LifeWiki, and each one uploaded p165 MWSS gun 2, 3, 4, ... 1998, 1999... -- all with just as much claim to a place on the LifeWiki as your patterns. The Category:Guns page would very quickly become unusable, with no way to sort through the piles of random patterns to find the ones that someone might actually want to know about.

LifeViewer (2)

The best way to use LifeViewer is to find an article that already uses it, and copy what it does. For embedded viewers, experiment on your user pages if you need to, or just use the Preview feature a lot. You can't just add RLE in a code block, as you tried in 122P80.1. It goes in a separate namespace. You would just type in something like "RLE:period80toadhassler" in the LifeWiki search field, create that page, paste the RLE in there, and save.

Then "period80toadhassler" becomes the "pname" that you would use, either in the infobox template or in "EmbedViewer" attributes. See the buckaroo article for an example, or just do a search on "EmbedViewer".

To figure out how to use LifeViewer's waypoint scripting commands to create loops, pans, zooms, and other animations, look at existing examples again (search on "viewerconfig"). Or launch LifeViewer, hit 'H', and scroll down to see the list of available scripting commands. Dvgrn (talk) 12:36, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Raw RLE in RLE: namespace

You wrote in a checkin comment: "How ... do I make this an actual RLE???" That's a very reasonable question, and it gave me trouble the first time around also.

There are several answers. If you want to be able to copy the RLE out, you can do one of two things: 1) add the pname to an embedded or infobox LifeViewer, and then launch LifeViewer and hit Ctrl+C to move the RLE to the clipboard; or 2) go back to RLE:Infinitegliderhotel5, hit the Edit button, and copy the text out of the textbox. The RLE looks fine in edit mode, just not when you're looking at the "article" and MediaWiki tries to interpret the leading #s and ignore the newlines and so on.

If you want that RLE to get uploaded to the LifeWiki, so it's available for download in the same way that (say) the RLE for 'buckaroo' is -- that's a slightly harder problem, still a work in progress. It used to be only Nathaniel could do that, so you'd send the RLE files to him in an email. But that doesn't work so well any more, so we're looking for a better way.

At the moment there are a lot of pages that have RLE:{pname} pages but no actual uploaded RLE file. There's Category:Pages_with_raw_RLE_code_but_no_uploaded_pattern_files for starters, but that's not anywhere near a complete list; something weird is wrong with that category.

Anyway, I hope to be able to make copies of all the RLE in RLE:{pname} namespace articles, periodically, in some automated way, and upload them to the LifeWiki pattern collection, with appropriate comments and links. But I haven't taken the time to set up that system yet (and I'm not sure exactly how I'll do it!)

So in the meantime, creating raw RLE articles ( RLE:{pname} ) is basically a request to the admins to upload the same RLE to the server. Eventually all of these will also be available at http://www.conwaylife.com/patterns/{pname}.rle -- just not sure exactly when. Dvgrn (talk) 01:34, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

A note re: the tracking category --- private discussion revealed that it's (probably) working fine, so long as rle=true (which indicates that an uploaded RLE file is present for a pattern, rather than an on-wiki RLE snippet) is not passed when there is not, in fact, an uploaded RLE file.

The reason why this parameter exists in the first place is that it's not possible to programmatically check for the presence or absence of off-wiki files using MediaWiki's templates, built-ins and parser functions. This also means that the infobox templates blindly trust the parameter (they have to, really).

TL;DR: when creating infoboxes, don't pass rle=true unless an uploaded RLE file is present. (And if no file has been uploaded in any format at all, pass nofile=true instead.) Apple Bottom (talk) 11:19, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

This might be a rule with some exceptions, though. I've been adding a lot of new articles recently from Lexicon Release 29, where I have in fact included rle=true in the infobox parameters, in the absence of any uploaded file. I consider these to be works in progress, and am promising to solve the missing-RLE problem... relatively soon. I just don't want to have to go back and find all those articles again and add the rle=true later! So far no one has been complaining, since the RLE can be retrieved from the RLE: namespace, or by Ctrl+C from inside a launched LifeViewer.

I'd almost say that if an on-wiki RLE snippet is present, it's okay to include rle=true for now, because that will allow the article to be included in a cleanup sweep by an automated script that creates and uploads all the missing RLE files. If you put in nofile=true, then it will just have to be edited again later... I suppose any further discussion along these lines is probably a topic for the Tiki bar, not a subsection of Entity Valkyrie's user page! Dvgrn (talk) 13:35, 8 October 2018 (UTC)

Moving pages

BTW, when someone (i.e. User:Sokwe, who's probably the closest we have to a deletionist) proposes deletion of an entry, e.g. on grounds of an oscillator not being the smallest of its period etc., and you'd like for the page to be moved rather than deleted outright, it's best to ask for this to be done by an admin (or anyone who has permission to move wiki pages, but I think it's just admins on the LifeWiki). Performing a proper page move keeps its history etc., allows for the move to be undone if community consensus later determines that a main-namespace-article is warranted after all, etc., so it's preferable to simply recreating the page in your userspace. Apple Bottom (talk) 11:27, 7 October 2018 (UTC)

I made a new page, 34p13 shuttle, and the RLE actualyl worked on the LifeViewer! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs)

I'm just too expert at making non-notable pages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs)

Re: non-notable pages -- it's not a problem, everybody makes mistakes early on... unless they just lurk and don't try to help out at all, in which case the LifeWiki never gets improved. It's kind of painful to do work and then have it immediately proposed for deletion, so if you survive that experience, you learn pretty quickly what edits will be accepted and what is doomed to be reverted. I took the liberty of moving "eater 6" to your user page. There's some more explanation of why, at User_talk:Entity_Valkyrie/Eater_6.

Thanks for your efforts so far! There's been quite a bit of cleanup I've followed along and done in various articles -- I'd appreciate it if you'd check Recent Changes and try to be careful not to do the same things again (too often), because it's hard for me to find time to keep up sometimes. But overall the result has been that you've contributed quite a bit of useful detail that wasn't there before.

And now you can make LifeViewer work, which is more than most people have taken the time to learn...! Dvgrn (talk) 10:52, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

Another detail that will hopefully be useful: when you're filling in a template and you have no idea about the bothersome heat, volatility, or strict volatility parameters, you can run the pattern in question through Jason Summers' Oscillizer utility and it will tell you everything -- also including period and minimum population and so on.

I added references in a couple of formats to the 34p14 shuttle page that you created. Once the heat and volatility are no longer "Unknown", it seems like this page could be done -- the stub tag could be removed. (Maybe to be really up-to-date it would be good to use Apple Bottom's nice CiteCatagolue template instead of a plain generic CiteWeb, but it's okay to do plain web references if you don't want to dig up the alternate reference syntax).

Seems to me that it makes perfect sense to use your p28 glider shuttle in the 34p14 article, as a great example of how the pattern can reflect gliders. That will get the pattern into the LifeWiki's big pattern collection eventually, too. But the "p28 glider shuttle" pattern doesn't really seem like a new standalone discovery. Also, if anyone needed to be listed as the discoverer, it would probably be Sokwe, who found and posted the reflection reaction... not so much to the first person who happened to paste four of them in a loop.

So it's a useful pattern to add to the RLE: namespace, but not every pattern needs its own separate article. I think it works well as an example in the 34p14 shuttle article (and I hope everyone more or less agrees with me, but I don't really know that yet!) Dvgrn (talk) 12:04, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

I was looking EVERYWHERE for a link to that page! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs)

The eater 6 / 22-bit eater

In the context of a snacker this eater does have slightly better clearance, so I've moved it back to the main namespace for now. Other people may still want to move it back, but let's give it another try now that it isn't called something quite as dangerous as "eater 6".

No doubt there are piles of other eaters with 22 bits, so this still isn't really a very good unique name. On the other hand, probably nobody else will be using "22-bit eater" to refer to any other eater, so we might get away with this particular neologism, more or less.

This all still seems to me to be not entirely necessary, though. If a lot of people had ever needed a way to refer to this super-specialized eater, it would have a name already. The fact that it doesn't have a name is a fairly good sign that it doesn't really need one. It has had a place in the snacker article for years already, and that's the main place where the thing is actually useful.

In any case, please don't go overboard on this kind of thing! For example, it doesn't seem like a good idea to mention this object in every article describing a mechanism with two replaceable eaters -- Fx153, Callahan G-to-H, etc. Usually there's no particular reason to make this replacement, and plenty of reasons not to -- increased population, decreased glider constructibility, potential confusion about whether this custom-looking catalyst is really required, etc.

As a general rule, please resist the temptation to make links from pages in the main namespace to pages in your User namespace. If an article doesn't belong in the main namespace, then a link to it doesn't belong there either.

Notability Revisited

It's probably worth reiterating the guideline* in Lifewiki:Pattern_pages: please think twice (or three or four times) before doing what you've done here. You invented a name for a pattern on your own, without seeing other people using it anywhere. Then you created a separate article that used that new name, and then a link with that new name.

If nobody else has ever used a name, it's really not too likely to be a good idea to add the name to the LifeWiki anywhere outside your User pages. If someone else invented a name, and several people on the forums or elsewhere have used that name over a reasonably long period of time, then it makes a lot more sense for you to create an article on it.

In other words, please try to avoid documenting your own discoveries and your own nomenclature. You can certainly suggest new names on the forums, and try to get other people to use those names and even create wiki articles about them. But it's better to not be in a hurry about this kind of thing. If nobody picks up on your suggestions, please take that as a strong hint. Names that are not in common use very quickly become a maintenance nightmare. It's quite possible that nobody else seems too excited about some suggested terminology, just because nobody can think of a reason to actually use it.

• Yes, I just edited the guideline to try and make this point about names... if there isn't general agreement on this point, I expect someone will correct me! Dvgrn (talk) 15:55, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

discoverer=Unknown

For future reference, if the discoverer or discovery year of a pattern is unknown, the parameter should just be left out of the infobox template entirely. It'll still show up as "Unknown" on the actual page, but it won't create an ugly redlink. Thanks! Ian07 (talk) 01:07, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Unknown just means i dont know — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs)

Yes, in which case it's best to just get rid of the parameter so that the wiki doesn't think it was found by a person named "Unknown." Ian07 (talk) 01:13, 2 November 2018 (UTC)

Put only one form of a pattern in the infobox

The infobox should only contain one form of a pattern (usually the simplest or smallest form). You have recently edited RLE:Jsp36 and RLE:F171 to include multiple forms. Instead, you should put the alternate form in a new section on the page. For examples, see snacker, 37P10.1, or dinner table.
~Sokwe 06:58, 3 November 2018

Notability Revisited Again

Unfortunately, you don't seem to have properly read/understood what Dvgrn said a few sections up. Please try to re-read it. It's great that you're trying to help out in the wiki, but you keep on making the same mistakes. In the future, please do not create pages for terminology that you have made up yourself. Make sure it's turned up at least once in the forums/Lexicon (if not more like 5-10 times), before creating a page.

Recently you've created a lot of pages where the names have never been used before by anyone else, such as Snarkless, Penta-boojum, and Crossgun_reaction. I can agree that the latter two likely deserve pages, so thanks for bringing that to people's attention. However, as mentioned by Dvgrn, you really should discuss these names on the forums a long time before you add them to the wiki. There might already be a name for a "Crossgun_reaction", and Kazyan as the discoverer really should get to name "Penta-boojum".

Lastly, you seem to be able to do quite a lot of wiki editing in a day. Since you are a "a newcomer on LifeWiki and can't tell if a pattern is notable or not", it would be helpful if you do not link new articles that you created from lots of other pages. Just wait a bit so others can agree that the new pages are notable, and then link them from other pages. Time to quote Apple Bottom.

Thank you for your efforts!! Goldtiger997 (talk) 09:04, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

User Pages

I added a section in my user page for the terminology I used, just like Wwei23 for replicators. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs) 10:29, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

For terms you've personally made up without getting general agreement on them first, moving your articles to your user space is a good start. They should really be created in your user space in the first place (if anywhere).

You've been leaving cleanup work only half-done sometimes, which means other people have to follow around after you and pick up after messes you make. Eventually someone may be tempted to try revoking the trusted flag on your account for a while, just to cut down on the damage rate to where it's possible for all us part-time volunteers to keep up. That would seem like an unfriendly way to get your attention, but at least it's sure to work...!

Today's half-finished cleanup, for example, includes a whole new section added to the Game of Life Status Page. "Snarkless" seems to be a category that only you have shown an interest in so far. And yet there's a link to "snarkless" in the new section, which goes to a redirect in the main namespace, which leads people to the article on your user page.

Any followable link in a main namespace article implies that it's recognized terminology that is in common use. So there shouldn't be any links in main namespace articles that point to user pages... but that's what keeps happening when you create and then move pages, especially if you don't check the box that suppresses the creation of a (main namespace) redirect. Dvgrn (talk) 13:59, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

The only reason that I originally let other people move this is because I didn't know how to move back then. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Entity Valkyrie (talk • contribs)

Signing talk page messages

In case you didn't already know, adding a signature to talk page messages is as easy as typing four tildes (~) in a row at the end of your message:

This is an example talk page message. ~~~~

is automatically converted to:

This is an example talk page message. Ian07 (talk) 00:00, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

This makes it a lot easier to know who posted it when just reading through, and makes it a lot easier on other editors who otherwise have to go through the trouble of marking a message as unsigned:

This is an example talk page message. {{unsigned|Ian07}}

becomes:

This is an example talk page message. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ian07 (talk • contribs)

---Ian07 (talk) 00:00, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

Moving pages (to user namespace)

@Entity Valkyrie, if you move any more pages from the main namespace to your user pages, as you did with the quinti-Snark pages today, please be careful to first uncheck the checkbox that says "Leave a redirect behind".

Otherwise you're just leaving a mess that someone else has to clean up. Redirects shouldn't be left in the main namespace that point to articles in the user namespace, any more than there should be main-namespace article links that point there. Dvgrn (talk) 03:01, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

I don't see a checkbox for the redirect. The only ones I see are "Move associated talk page" and "Watch source page and target page." Are you sure it's not restricted to administrators? Ian07 (talk) 03:59, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

Interesting! No, I'm not sure at all -- it just looks like all the other options to me, and I hadn't run into this situation before.

In that case there's nothing much to be done, except that it would be helpful if the person moving the page could also tag the inevitable redirect page with a {{speedydeletion|reason for deletion}} tag. At least, I don't think this is really the kind of thing that the Proposed Deletion mechanism was designed for, and I don't want to bother waiting around fourteen days to do such a trivial cleanup.

I've cavalierly modified the deletion guidelines to cover this case, so if anyone disagrees, please feel free to speak up on any of the relevant Talk pages. The current guidelines say anyone can request the two-week period on a redirect's Talk page as soon as the Speedy Deletion tag shows up. Sound OK? Dvgrn (talk) 12:12, 25 November 2018 (UTC)

I now feel like due to all these non-notable pages, I'm useless at contribution to the wiki now. Entity Valkyrie (talk) 05:01, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

I disagree! You're definitely difficult to keep up with sometimes, but you have lots of new ideas on what should be added to existing pages. It's really interesting to have that perspective. People who have been around here too long often just think, "Oh, everybody knows that". But then if someone new shows up and tries to figure out a subject starting from scratch with a LifeWiki article, there are all kinds of subtle pieces missing that aren't explained anywhere.

The LifeWiki is a collaborative effort, so there's bound to be disagreement sometimes about whether specific changes are a good idea or not. That's not a bad thing, though it's bound to be annoying sometimes. Everyone has to fit their ideas into one common LifeWiki, so eventually a consensus emerges (unless someone forks the project and we end up with two LifeWikis, but luckily I don't think that's likely to happen.)

For example, when I was in the middle of doing a lot of Life-Lexicon-related editing a while back, I took shortcuts a few times and put two different versions of a pattern into a single infobox. Based on a comment Sokwe made recently, I now think that was probably a mistake -- alternate versions should go into embedded viewers, and keep the infobox cleaner.

Anyway, you've been doing a lot of editing that is not creating whole new pages. Probably whenever you create a new page outside of your User namespace, about a pattern or name that you made up yourself, the page is going to continue to get moved or deleted, based on the general consensus. But you don't have to keep doing that. Dvgrn (talk) 11:56, 2 December 2018 (UTC)

Sparker categories

Just wanted to let you know I just made a new template for the sparker period categories:

{{SparkerPeriod|p=#}}

where # is the period for that category. It adds both of the navboxes and adds it to all the relevant higher categories. Ian07 (talk) 15:12, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

Recovery times

You recently changed the Lx65's recovery time from 57 to 34. 34 is the absolute-minimal "instant appearance" recovery time -- you'd have to make the second Herschel magically appear in the input location and delete the first natural glider very early somehow, in both the input and output locations.

The problem is, when you replace "57" with "34" you're destroying useful information and replacing it with much-less-useful information. That "57" was in the article for a good reason: if you want to build generic Herschel circuitry, you can use Lx65 conduits without worrying, as long as you don't have any signals closer together than 57 ticks. Yes, there might theoretically be special cases where this could be reduced by suppressing the output Herschel's FNG somehow, for making true period fifty-something guns -- but that's a very very special case at best.

That special case could be called out in the text if you really want to, but really it seems like pointless theoretically hand-waving unless it's accompanied by an illustration of an actual circuit that can process sub-p57 Lx65 conduits. I don't think that's going to be very easy in practice. The catalysts in the Lx65 don't leave a lot of room to reach in and suppress the FNGs, but if you don't do that then 57 really is the minimum period.

I'm mostly writing this because your 57-to-34 change implies that you might consider changing the recovery times of all the other conduits to their "instant-appearance" values -- 35 ticks for the Fx77, for example. Please don't do that, and in general please be careful not to remove useful information when you're adding special-case details. Dvgrn (talk) 12:09, 30 December 2018 (UTC)