Life Lexicon update -- now Release 29, 2 July 2018

For general discussion about Conway's Game of Life.
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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by GUYTU6J » September 16th, 2016, 11:48 am

Any progress now?

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » September 16th, 2016, 2:00 pm

GUYTU6J wrote:Any progress now?
Well... now I'm aiming for Golly 2.9 (unless it turns out to be 3.0) and the eleventh anniversary of the last Life Lexicon update, instead of the tenth.

There are still quite a number of redlinks left, created when I added definitions for new things that needed references to other new things. I've been working on those intermittently.

Short summary: I keep expecting to be able to get back to this project, but there's always something else that gets in the way. The final rollout is not something that can be done incrementally -- have to get to a certified good copy of the Lexicon with no redlinks left, and then run the scripts to build all the individual linked files.

---------------------------------------------

By the way, sometime in the last week or two it looks like Stephen Silver's original Life Lexicon site finally got taken offline. It's been in limbo for a while, in a read-only state where Stephen no longer had FTP access to change anything.

That means there are a lot of Lexicon links to be changed in the LifeWiki, I believe. Maybe we can find a new home for the Lexicon and roll out the new edition to there -- hopefully somewhere on Tom Rokicki's radicaleye.com, which has been collecting backup copies of Life websites for over fifteen years now.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by Apple Bottom » September 16th, 2016, 3:35 pm

dvgrn wrote:That means there are a lot of Lexicon links to be changed in the LifeWiki, I believe.
I changed all links to the Life Lexicon on the wiki to use Template:LinkLexicon earlier this year, at least partly in anticipation of this turn of events.

So modulo any links I may have missed, and perhaps a few inline links in non-Mainspace pages, that template should be the only place that'll have to be updated.
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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 20th, 2017, 2:10 pm

I'm finally getting close to done with the neverending Lexicon update project, hopefully just in time for the release of Golly 3.0. There are only twenty TBD items left to clean up, mostly easy ones, where there used to be hundreds.

Here's a definition I tried my hand at writing this morning, but I'm not entirely sure about it:

Code: Select all

:finger:  A protruding cell in an {oscillator} or {dying spark}, with the ability to modify a nearby active reaction.  Like a {thumb}, a finger cell appears at the edge of a reaction envelope and is the only live cell in its row or column.  However, a finger cell remains alive for two ticks before dying, whereas a thumb cell dies after one tick.
I'll post the entire revised ASCII file here in the next day or two, as soon as the last twenty fixes are done. I'm sure that mistakes will have crept in here and there, and also there will be details in some old definitions that are still out of date that I missed updating. So I hope people will be able to find time to review the definitions, old and new... I've been staring at them for so long now that I probably can't see anything any more.

EDIT: I also had a lot of trouble dealing with the various breeder types without getting into a real hornet's nest of subtle classification problems, which might be appropriate for an extended summary in the LifeWiki but should probably stay out of the Lexicon. I ended up adding links to "breeder" from just the four common breeder types -- MMM, MMS, MSM and SMM -- and then giving some idea of how much stickier things can get, under the "Pianola breeder" definition:

Code: Select all

:breeder:  Any pattern whose {population} grows at a quadratic rate, although it is usual to exclude {spacefiller}s.  It is easy to see that this is the fastest possible growth rate.
     The term is also sometimes used to mean specifically the breeder created by Bill Gosper's group at MIT, which was the first known pattern exhibiting superlinear growth.
     There are four common types of breeder, known as MMM, MMS, MSM and SMM (where M=moving and S=stationary).  Typically an MMM breeder is a {rake} {puffer}, an MMS breeder is a puffer producing puffers which produce stationary objects ({still life}s and/or {oscillator}s), an MSM breeder is a {gun} puffer and an SMM breeder is a rake gun. There are, however, less obvious variants of these types.  Other less common breeder categories (SSS, hybrid MSS/MSM, etc.) can be created with some difficulty, based on {universal constructor} technology; see {Pianola breeder}.
     The original breeder was of type MSM (a p64 puffer puffing p30 glider guns).  The known breeder with the smallest initial population is the {metacatacryst}.


:Pianola breeder: A series of patterns constructed by Paul Tooke in 2010, based on a simplification and extension of the {Gemini} spaceship's construction mechanism.  Tooke  produced a number of slow-salvo-constructed patterns with superlinear growth,  including a series of breeder patterns of previously unknown types.  For some patterns, the Gemini's two {construction} arms were moved to a permanent stationary platform, using fourteen glider-loop channels instead of twelve.
     Some of these breeder patterns remain difficult to classify unambiguously.  For example, one pattern was designed to be an MSS breeder -- a modified {Gemini} spaceship puffing {slide gun}s which build lines of {block}s.  However, the slide guns produce both moving and stationary objects at a linear rate, because streams of gliders are needed to reach out to the construction zone to do the {push} reaction and build more blocks.  The pattern could therefore be classified as a hybrid MSM/MSS breeder.  Other breeder patterns utilizing slide guns and {universal constructor} technology are likely to cause similar classification ambiguities.
Along the same lines as last year, complete definitions (or completely re-written definitions) are quite likely to be added to the Lexicon if they involve a term that is in common use, and if they're better than what's already there.

At this point, out of simple self-defense, I'll very likely ignore any and all vague suggestions that such-and-such term ought to be defined, or that an existing definition ought to be improved.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 20th, 2017, 10:06 pm

Okay -- here's the current Release 26 beta, with all of my To Be Done items finally crossed off (I hope!)

[attachment "draft ASCII version of Life Lexicon Release 26 for Golly 3.0" removed -- see Beta 8 attachment many posts below]

At this point it would be fairly easy to mine the LifeWiki for a lot more definitions that are not in the Life Lexicon. However, clearly not every article in the LifeWiki belongs in the Life Lexicon, even in abbreviated form! Let's keep the detailed stuff in the wiki, and add short summaries to the Lexicon only when they are really likely to be useful to someone.

However, there are almost certainly anachronisms that I've missed in the existing definitions (though I've fixed a lot of them). Here again these will be most likely to get fixed if someone puts a complete correction in a code block -- ideally with the current beta definition quoted also for comparison, like this:

Code: Select all

:antediluvian:  Old

Code: Select all

:antediluvian:  Ancient, out of date.  Literally, "before the [Biblical] Flood".
Slightly relevant note: There's one big difference between the above attachment and the final ASCII version: I've taken out all the newlines inside paragraphs. At the last minute I'll run a script to wrap those lines at 72 characters, so don't add any newlines except at the end of each paragraph.

If you want to get technical,
  • All new paragraphs inside definitions should be indented by five spaces.
  • Continuations after ASCII patterns (no new paragraph) should be indented by three spaces.
  • Two newlines in a row signals the end of the definition.
  • Aliases should be defined with “=” when the alternate term is completely equivalent to the name where the actual definition is given.
  • “See” is used instead when a definition of a different term is given as part of a larger explanation, e.g., in :Turing machine: See {universal computer}. A Turing machine is not the same thing as a universal computer exactly, it's a specific case... but if you read the "universal computer" entry you'll find relevant paragraphs about Paul Rendell's Turing machine.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 20th, 2017, 10:10 pm

dvgrn wrote:At this point it would be fairly easy to mine the LifeWiki for a lot more definitions that are not in the Life Lexicon. However, clearly not every article in the LifeWiki belongs in the Life Lexicon, even in abbreviated form!
On the other hand...

after something of a marathon weekend involving a ridiculous amount of last-minute definition writing...

it turns out that Release 26 of the Lexicon is now suddenly less than 40 terms away from the nice round number of 1000 definitions.

(That doesn't count a fair number of aliases, which have pointers to definitions but don't have separate definitions themselves. With aliases, the count is already up above 1150 terms.)

With the Golly 3.0 release date getting very close, I won't be wanting to think too hard about what classes of definitions to add and what to leave out. Mostly I've already done that, and am reasonably happy with Release 26; as far as I'm concerned, someone else can feel free to take over and add another pile of definitions if they really want to. Maybe another eleven years from now.

Still, if people want to use this thread to brainstorm another 40 terms or so that really need to be readily available in the Golly Life Lexicon, I'd certainly be very grateful.

It might be worth mentioning the terms first, in case I turn out to have a strong opinion that some of them shouldn't be in the Lexicon -- I'd rather hash that out right away and not waste a lot of other people's time and effort.

I'm thinking that these hypothetical 40 definitions should probably mostly be named patterns that are useful in larger constructions. It's a good bit more convenient to retrieve these from the Lexicon, when you suddenly notice that you need them, than to go dig them up from some random half-remembered stamp collection somewhere.

So... with some trepidation, and with the above caveats, I am (somewhat) open to other suggestions (!).

EDIT: A little bit of cross-checking -- here are the 305 terms and aliases that are new to Release 26:

Code: Select all

0hd Demonoid
10hd Demonoid
119P4H1V0
135-degree MWSS-to-G
17c/45 spaceship
180-degree kickback
1G seed
(23,5)c/79
(23,5)c/79 Herschel climber
24-cell quadratic growth
25-cell quadratic growth
25P3H1V0.1
25P3H1V0.2
26-cell quadratic growth
295P5H1V1
2c/3
2c/5 spaceship
2c/7 spaceship
2 eaters
30P5H2V0
31c/240
31c/240 Herschel-pair climber
3c/7 spaceship
44P5H2V0
45-degree LWSS-to-G
45-degree MWSS-to-G
56P6H1V0
58P5H1V1
60P5H2V0
67P5H1V1
70P5H2V0
7x9 eater
83P7H1V1
86P5H1V1
90-degree kickback
9hd
against the grain
AK94 gun
ambidextrous
apgluxe
apgmera
apgnano
apgsearch
armless
B60
banana spark
beehive wire
Bellman
BFx59H
blinker pull
Blockic
block pull
bobsled
BRx46B
by flops
Bx125
Bx222
c/12 spaceship
c/2 spaceship
c/3 spaceship
c/4 spaceship
c/5 spaceship
c/6 spaceship
c/7 spaceship
c/10 spaceship
Callahan G-to-H
Catagolue
Caterloopillar
CatForce
Centipede
channel
chirality
circuit
clearance
clock inserter
clock insertion
colour-changing
colour-preserving
component
composite
composite conduit
computational universality
conduit 1
constellation
construction arm
construction elbow
construction envelope
construction lane
construction universality
copperhead
crab
Demonoid
dependent conduit
destructor arm
dried
duoplet
dying spark
eater5
edgy
elbow
elbow operation
elementary conduit
envelope
exponential filter
F116
F117
F166
F171
fd
finger
fire
fireship
first natural glider
FNG
freeze-dried
frozen
full diagonal
Fx119
Fx119 inserter
Fx153
Fx158
Fx176
Fx77
Gemini
Gemini puffer
Geminoid
ghost Herschel
glider constructible
glider lane
glider pair
glider recipe
glider reflector
Gn
Gotts dots
gp
half-baked knightship
half-bakery reaction
half diagonal
Halfmax
hand
HBK
hd
Herschel climber
Herschel descendant
Herschel great-grandparent
Herschel-pair climber
Herschel-to-glider
high-bandwidth telegraph
highway robber
H-to-G
H-to-MWSS
independent conduit
intermediate target
JavaLifeSearch
JLS
kickback
L112
L156
lane
LifeHistory
LifeViewer
lightspeed bubble
lightspeed telegraph
linear growth
linear propagator
line-cutting reaction
loafer
loaf pull
lobster
LWSS-to-G
Lx200
macro-spaceship
megacell
metacell
metapixel
monochromatic salvo
monoparity salvo
Moore neighbourhood
MWSS-to-G
negative spaceship
nonfiller
non-trivial
NW31
NW31T120
one per generation
Online Life-Like CA Soup Search
Orthogonoid
Osqrtlogt
OTCA Metapixel
overclocking
p15 reflector
p1 megacell
p1 telegraph
p45 glider gun
p4 reflector
p5 reflector
p6 pipsquirter
p6 reflector
p72 quasi-shuttle
p7 pipsquirter
p7 reflector
p8 G-to-H
p8 reflector
Parallel HBK
Parallel HBK gun
parasite
parity
period doubler
period multiplier
Pianola breeder
pi calculator
pi climber
PRNG
pseudo-random number generator
pufferfish
pufferfish spaceship
pull
Pulsar Pixel Display
push
qd
quadratic filter
quadratic growth
quadratic replicator
quadratic sawtooth
quarter diagonals
R190
R64
reaction envelope
reburnable fuse
recovery time
rectifier
recursive filter
R-mango
Rx202
salvo
second natural glider
seed
Seeds of Destruction Game
self-constructing
self-supporting
semi-Snark
shield bug
shoulder
sidesnagger
signal elbow
Silver G-to-H
Silver reflector
Simkin glider gun
single-arm
single-channel
single-lane
sL
slow elbow
Snark
SNG
SODGame
space nonfiller
spaghetti monster
Spartan
spiral growth
sqrtgun
staged recovery
statorless
stream
superlinear growth
swimmer
swimmer lane
switch
switchable gun
switch engine channel
switch engine chute
switch-engine ping-pong
syringe
tandem glider
target
tee
telegraph
The Online Life-Like CA Soup Search
T-nosed p5
toggleable gun
toggle circuit
TOLLCASS
toolkit
transparent
transparent lane
trigger
trivial
two-arm
UC
unit cell
universal
universal toolkit
von Neumann neighbourhood
Wainwright's tagalong
waterbear
wave
wavestretcher
wedge
wedge grow
weekender distaff
wire
with the grain
*WSS
zebra stripes
zone of influence
EDIT: Added terms from Beta 2 and Beta 3, changed :freeze-dried salvo: to :freeze-dried:.

I took out only a couple of terms, both non-alpha-character aliases, "2 eaters" and "eaters +", that just didn't seem to be necessary any more. A few more terms probably haven't been used much for a decade or more; those are mostly just labeled with "This term is no longer in use."

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by rowett » August 21st, 2017, 12:59 pm

The following definitions are {referenced} but not :defined:

colorized Life
glider-constructible
half diagonals
Herschel transceivers
lanes
lobster
Missing targets
repeat rate
spaghetti monster
zebra stripes

The following definitions are {referenced} and then :defined: in a difference case:

Ghost Herschel
OTCA metapixel
P1 megacell
parallel HBK
Push

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 21st, 2017, 1:29 pm

rowett wrote:The following definitions are {referenced} but not :defined:

colorized Life
glider-constructible
half diagonals
Herschel transceivers
lanes
lobster
Missing targets
repeat rate
spaghetti monster
zebra stripes

The following definitions are {referenced} and then :defined: in a difference case:

Ghost Herschel
OTCA metapixel
P1 megacell
parallel HBK
Push
Thanks! I hadn't gotten around to running that check again after the last run of webify.sh. These are all very easy fixes, except possibly for the case-sensitivity question -- I'll have to dig through Stephen's code and see if the case is handled correctly when a term is the first word in the sentence. If not, I suppose there's an obvious workaround. I'll post a repaired version 2 of the beta this evening.

Have found one paragraph in :universal computer: that I apparently updated for Version 25r and then forgot about. I'll have to run a report showing before vs. after for all the altered definitions, and see if anything else like that is hiding in there.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 21st, 2017, 8:31 pm

Okay, the next draft is Life Lexicon Release 26 Beta 2, August 21:

[attachment "beta #2 of Life Lexicon Release 26 for Golly 3.0" removed -- see Beta 8 attachment many posts below]

Change log:
fixed Chris's reported mismatches, adding eight terms --
  • 3c/7 spaceship
  • 83P7H1V1
  • apgluxe
  • c/7 spaceship
  • lightspeed bubble
  • lobster
  • spaghetti monster
  • zebra stripes
... and changed "quarter diagonals" to "quarter diagonal" and "OTCA Metapixel" to "OTCA metapixel".
Also trimmed trailing spaces, and found and fixed an incomplete definition of "slow elbow".
Also updated the introduction a little and added the bibliography back on at the end.
EDIT 8/22: Added {c/10 spaceship} to re-complete the series that Stephen added in the 2006 draft version, mentioned Caterloopillars in several more places, and fixed the table in :spaceship: (this will all show up in Release 26 Beta 3).

Was impressed to discover in passing that the Life Lexicon hasn't had an update in so long that "website" and "email" still had hyphens in them. Pretty sure that's not a British English thing, just a Very Early Twenty-First Century thing.

... Still haven't gotten around to running webify.sh myself, though, so it's perfectly possible that I've broken something else. Not to worry, there will be another beta before Golly 3.0 comes out, anyway -- I have to fix the TBD items at the top of Beta 2.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 22nd, 2017, 9:44 pm

Okay, well, hmm, every time I look through the new definitions, I find more mistakes and inconsistencies. That doesn't seem like a terribly good sign, given that there's about a week left before Golly 3.0 is released. But with each pass the errors are getting a little more subtle, at least.

Anybody want to dig up a few more mistakes that I've missed? It seems particularly likely, with all the new spaceship speeds and glider-constructible spaceships and suchlike, that there are still antiquated phrases hiding here and there, saying that "the only X of type Y are {such-and-such specific objects}" where in fact object Z has been discovered since that was written.

Anyway, here's Beta 3. Changes are noted in the changelog in a previous post. The biggest change is that a lot of the new spaceship definitions are now labeled properly with speed, direction and period.

[attachment "beta #3 of ASCII Life Lexicon Release 26 for Golly 3.0" removed -- see Beta 8 attachment many posts below]

Please read, review, and report random rough spots if possible -- thanks! I'll probably leave this version up for several days, then run the scripts to make the multipage HTML version, and the version with Golly-compatible links and so on.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 23rd, 2017, 5:15 pm

One more small update -- two of the Herschel conduit definitions, Fx153 and Fx158, were mysteriously missing their diagrams. Defined {Herschel great-grandparent} while I was in there, too.

[attachment "beta #4 of ASCII Life Lexicon Release 26 for Golly 3.0" removed -- see Beta 8 attachment many posts below]
I'm not seeing very many people downloading these files yet -- not that I'm terribly surprised. Maybe I should provide a nice easy colorful clickable link to the latest beta instead? FYI, unlike the attachment, the linked version is word-wrapped to 72 characters. EDIT: updated link to current version.

Y'all are on notice as of right now: if there are any silly mistakes or anachronisms left in the Lexicon update, it's going to be your collective fault if you don't say something, not mine...! I've been doing this way too long now, can't see the forest for the trees any more.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by wildmyron » August 24th, 2017, 1:58 am

A few minor issues. They are mostly formatting issues. I only skimmed the whole document so it was unlikely I'd pick up too many errors of fact.
  • ":c/6 spaceship:" mentions "A {Caterloopillar} can theoretically be configured to move at c/10"
  • ":c/12 spaceship:" is the only entry with the phrase "{Caterloopillar} spaceship". All other references are simply "{Caterloopillar}"
  • ":CNWH: Conweh, creator of the Life universe." I can't figure out who Conweh is and I've no idea where to find "the Life Universe"
  • ":Cordership:" there's a formatting issue in the pattern. I don't know if it's also a problem in the source file
  • ":glider:" is missing a newline character after the pattern
  • ":non-trivial: A non-trivial period-N oscillator is one in which at least one cell oscillates at the full period.
  • ":reflector:" typo; and also contains a spurious line with a single '.':

    Code: Select all

       50 generations _of_ less.
    .
         See also  {rectifier}, {glider turner}.
  • ":zone of influence:" Formatting of 2nd paragraph
  • Formatting of "Tight Bounds on Periodic Cell Configurations in Life" entry in Bibliography
There are also a few other minor formatting issues. I don't know if you care enough to fix them. They are:
three space sentence spacing (e.g. :simkin glider gun:); single space paragraph indentation (e.g. last paragraph of :with the grain:); missing '.' characters at end of some entries. I can provide a list if you like.

Thank you for including reference to my solution of the fixed length lightspeed bubble problem.
The 5S project (Smallest Spaceships Supporting Specific Speeds) is now maintained by AforAmpere. The latest collection is hosted on GitHub and contains well over 1,000,000 spaceships.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by drc » August 24th, 2017, 2:22 am

wildmyron wrote:":CNWH: Conweh, creator of the Life universe." I can't figure out who Conweh is and I've no idea where to find "the Life Universe"
I think that's a pun on YHWH/Yahweh, but I think it's just a little goof someone slipped in there.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 24th, 2017, 3:07 am

wildmyron wrote:A few minor issues. They are mostly formatting issues. I only skimmed the whole document so it was unlikely I'd pick up too many errors of fact.
Thanks! These are really helpful. I had found a couple of these, but missed all the rest.
wildmyron wrote:There are also a few other minor formatting issues. I don't know if you care enough to fix them. They are:
three space sentence spacing (e.g. :simkin glider gun:); single space paragraph indentation (e.g. last paragraph of :with the grain:); missing '.' characters at end of some entries. I can provide a list if you like.
I just finished spending five hours fighting through the dozens of errors produced by Stephen Silver's scripts (from a dozen or more years ago) for HTMLizing the ASCII lexicon. Turns out makehtml.sh is really really touchy about indentation, so I suspect I've found all those problems now.

It doesn't seem to care about three spaces at the ends of sentences so much, but I've added a TBD to take care of that, and any missing periods at ends of sentences, and any lack of capitalization at the beginning of each definition. Don't bother with a list until the next HTML-page version comes out, but then if there are any left I'd definitely be interested.

On to Beta 5! Now it turns out that I have to update my wordwrap script to deal with indentation slightly more consistently. That means that the latest and greatest Lexicon text file is attached, but I won't have a new link to an HTML-page version until sometime tomorrow.

[attachment "beta #5 of ASCII Life Lexicon Release 26 for Golly 3.0" removed -- see Beta 8 attachment many posts below]
There are actually quite a few new definitions, because makehtml.sh reported various new mismatches and refused to compile the HTML until there weren't any. It seemed like a good idea to keep going until makehtml.sh stopped complaining...!

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by wildmyron » August 24th, 2017, 3:12 am

drc wrote:
wildmyron wrote:":CNWH: Conweh, creator of the Life universe." I can't figure out who Conweh is and I've no idea where to find "the Life Universe"
I think that's a pun on YHWH/Yahweh, but I think it's just a little goof someone slipped in there.
Right, I thought it was a joke at first, but apparently there are people with the surname Conweh, so I was confused.

@dvgrn: Great. I'll have another look through the next version of the html file.
The 5S project (Smallest Spaceships Supporting Specific Speeds) is now maintained by AforAmpere. The latest collection is hosted on GitHub and contains well over 1,000,000 spaceships.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by rowett » August 24th, 2017, 4:10 am

Only four missing :definitions: reported by webify.sh:
  • 10hd
  • billiard table
  • oblique
  • ticks

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by wildmyron » August 24th, 2017, 5:05 am

Some issues with the labelling of ships:
  • :60P5H2V0: (2c/5 orthogonally, c5) <- should be p5
  • :70P5H2V0: (2c/5 orthogonally, c/5) <- should be p5
The 5S project (Smallest Spaceships Supporting Specific Speeds) is now maintained by AforAmpere. The latest collection is hosted on GitHub and contains well over 1,000,000 spaceships.

Semi-active here - recovering from a severe case of LWTDS.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by calcyman » August 24th, 2017, 6:30 am

drc wrote:
wildmyron wrote:":CNWH: Conweh, creator of the Life universe." I can't figure out who Conweh is and I've no idea where to find "the Life Universe"
I think that's a pun on YHWH/Yahweh, but I think it's just a little goof someone slipped in there.
Bill Gosper seems to use the CNWH tetragrammaton disproportionately more than any other Lifenthusiasts, so I think he coined it. The earliest reference I have was 1992:
rwg wrote:Either R. K. Guy or his son ("some guy", in Winning Ways) found the glider
(by hand!). According to Gardner's earliest scripture, CNWH noticed
the lightweight (on a screen) and deduced the rest.
What do you do with ill crystallographers? Take them to the mono-clinic!

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 24th, 2017, 12:29 pm

rowett wrote:Only four missing :definitions: reported by webify.sh:
  • 10hd
  • billiard table
  • oblique
  • ticks
wildmyron wrote:Some issues with the labelling of ships:
  • :60P5H2V0: (2c/5 orthogonally, c5) <- should be p5
  • :70P5H2V0: (2c/5 orthogonally, c/5) <- should be p5
Both fixed in Beta 6, which will probably show up sometime tomorrow (at the rate I'm going). Thanks!

-- I guess I can put up a one-page HTML version of the current state of things, which I'll call Beta 5.5 -- no word wrapping yet, it's coming up next, sorry about the annoying long lines.

clickable link to the latest beta

Maybe I'll put up a nice easy-to-explore multipage HTML version of Beta 6, for a change -- Stephen's impressively picky makehtml.sh script has now finally run out of formatting details to complain about, and is cheerfully producing output HTML. Just keep watching this space, I guess...!

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by Andrew » August 25th, 2017, 9:15 am

I've attached a zip file containing a Lexicon folder with the latest .htm files suitable for Golly. Just replace the existing Lexicon subfolder in Golly's Help folder and let us know if you spot any problems.
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Lexicon.zip
Lexicon folder for Golly
(205.96 KiB) Downloaded 211 times
Use Glu to explore CA rules on non-periodic tilings: DominoLife and HatLife

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 25th, 2017, 9:50 am

Andrew wrote:I've attached a zip file containing a Lexicon folder with the latest .htm files suitable for Golly. Just replace the existing Lexicon subfolder in Golly's Help folder and let us know if you spot any problems.
I've made a copy of Beta 6 available online also -- single page and multi-page versions. But using Golly is recommended -- among other things, Golly lets you click to open and run the patterns.

One known issue is that links don't get auto-created inside tables, so the :spaceship: entry still needs a little work.

I've added a few more definitions --

traffic lights extruder
large prime oscillator
bounding box
engineless
logarithmic growth

Just realized there's nothing in there yet for Kazyan's :bumper: reflector. Very odd -- I thought I'd thrown those in there months ago. Will check back and fix that in Beta 7.

-- Like the pipsquirter reflectors, it seemed like a good idea to have the different bumper periods specifically named with separate sample patterns, just so that they could be easily copied out and used in larger constructions in Golly.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by rowett » August 25th, 2017, 10:45 am

This script will take the single page lexicon and add "Show in Viewer" links to each pattern. Example output can be seen here.

Source needs to be "lex.html"
Output will be in file "lexlv.html".

You'll also need "lv-plugin.js" in the same folder as "lexlv.html" once deployed.

Code: Select all

! /bin/sh
# Add LifeViewer to the Life Lexicon

# define input and output file names
input=lex.html
output1=lex1.html
output2=lex2.html
output3=lexlv.html

# insert the LifeViewer plugin into the head section
cat $input | sed 's@</head>@<meta name="LifeViewer" content="viewer pre 150">\n<script src="lv-plugin.js"></script>\n&@' > $output1

# add a show in viewer button to each pattern
cat $output1 | sed 's@<pre>@<div class="viewer">\n<button type="button" onclick="updateViewer(this);return false;">Show in Viewer</button>\n&@' > $output2
cat $output2 | sed 's@</pre>@&\n</div>\n@' > $output3

# tidy up
rm -f $output1 $output2

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by wildmyron » August 25th, 2017, 11:54 am

24cell quad growth says it superceded 26cell quad growth by 2 days. Should be 25cell quad growth.
The 5S project (Smallest Spaceships Supporting Specific Speeds) is now maintained by AforAmpere. The latest collection is hosted on GitHub and contains well over 1,000,000 spaceships.

Semi-active here - recovering from a severe case of LWTDS.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by dvgrn » August 25th, 2017, 4:04 pm

wildmyron wrote:24cell quad growth says it superceded 26cell quad growth by 2 days. Should be 25cell quad growth.
Fixed in upcoming Beta 7, which should be available late tonight -- thanks!
rowett wrote:This script will take the single page lexicon and add "Show in Viewer" links to each pattern. Example output can be seen here.
I tried out the Ctrl+C Copy functionality, and almost got the right thing but not quite. What ends up in the clipboard is the correct ASCII pattern, except that every line except the first has a prefix tab character:

Code: Select all

.................................O.
	................O...............O.O
	......O.O......O.....OO........O...
	......O....O....O.OOOOOO....OO.....
	......O.OOOOOOOO..........O..O.OOO.
	.........O.....O.......OOOO....OOO.
	....OO.................OOO.O.......
	.O..OO.......OO........OO..........
	.O..O..............................
	O..................................
	.O..O..............................
	.O..OO.......OO........OO..........
	....OO.................OOO.O.......
	.........O.....O.......OOOO....OOO.
	......O.OOOOOOOO..........O..O.OOO.
	......O....O....O.OOOOOO....OO.....
	......O.O......O.....OO........O...
	................O...............O.O
	.................................O.
LifeViewer handles this without any trouble, apparently stripping off the tab characters before processing the ASCII text. But Golly tends to think of whitespace characters as the same as space characters, which are the same as OFF cells. I think this is because of an old format using spaces and O's instead of periods and o's.

Anyway, if you paste the above into Golly, the spaceship won't fly for very long, because the cell on the top line is just slightly misplaced.

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Re: Life Lexicon update

Post by rowett » August 25th, 2017, 5:21 pm

dvgrn wrote: I tried out the Ctrl+C Copy functionality, and almost got the right thing but not quite. What ends up in the clipboard is the correct ASCII pattern, except that every line except the first has a prefix tab character.
It should work now - try here and refresh your browser.

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