Boring

Boring is a term used to describe certain composite oscillators which, while not trivial (i.e. having at least one cell which oscillates at the full period of the oscillator) generally are not of particularly major interest outside of potentially being the smallest known oscillator of a known period, as they do not provide any markedly new rotors or new reactions.

Examples of boring oscillators

LCM oscillators, such as boring p24 (composed of a figure eight and a pulsar), fumarole on Rob's p16 and jam on 44P7.2, are examples of oscillators usually considered to be boring, as these rely on spark interactions between two oscillators of different periods to produce another oscillator with period equal to the least common multiple of the original oscillators' periods.

There are also "rephasing" oscillator combinations, in which one oscillator (usually a billiard table) is perturbed by another. While less common, these are still not of major interest.

Relay oscillators which repeatedly redirect spaceships, such as Snark-based adjustable glider loops and the pentadecathlon-based 6 bits, are also boring in a sense as they can be easily modified to give an infinite number of different periods. Non-boring spaceship loops usually require the reflection reaction to be dependent on the spaceships existing, as in p26 glider shuttle.

Examples of non-boring oscillators

Oscillators in which a lower-period object hassles something of a higher period are not considered boring, as the object being hassled depends on the lower-period object to be periodic itself.

Also see

• LifeWiki:Notability for an explanation of when a topic or pattern merits its own article on LifeWiki