Moosey wrote:EDIT:There was some discussion of this on this thread, but I never got a good enough response in my opinion-- can someone with bellman or some other similar utility see if there is a mechanism for replacing the block (using the surplus G) to make a CC snark?
Polite request for people asking this kind of question: please take the trouble to link to the previous discussion (starting
here and ending
here, in this case). Otherwise however many people are interested in the question will separately have to do the exact same search.
Posts asking people to run Bellman / CatForce / ptbsearch / catfind /
Guam's CollisionsSearch on your behalf will generally run into a serious problem: usually nobody will bother to respond to the message, let alone setting up a search utility and running your search. The time investment you're asking for is not measured in minutes. It might be hours, but more likely it's days, weeks, or months.
Every now and then someone definitely does make a
great suggestion along these lines that leads to a new discovery. But it's generally really useful to spend a lot of time running search utilities yourself, before trying to make a lot of these suggestions. Otherwise you just plain aren't likely to have a good sense of whether a search is vaguely plausible vs. near-hopeless.
As mentioned in the previous discussion, it's definitely not impossible that some lucky catalyst might throw a block back to exactly the right position. However, apparently everybody reading that discussion decided that, in their subjective judgment based on collective previous experience about this kind of search, the odds of success were so low that it wasn't anywhere near worth the effort to run the search. The few people that spend time running this kind of search will usually have their own educated guesses about the best places to look, and will probably already be using up whatever CPU time they have available, looking in those places.
You're certainly free to come up with your own ideas, but if no one else shows any interest in them, bringing up the same question again probably won't change anyone's mind. The way to prove everyone wrong would be to run the search yourself, and actually find something.
In this case, your
estimate of the available space to add catalysts is much too optimistic. It's more like this --
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x = 45, y = 25, rule = LifeHistory
19.2D$15.4D5.2A$14.3D7.2A$13.3D9.6B$12.3D9.8B$11.4D8.4B2.4B$11.4D7.4B
4.4B$11.4D6.4B6.4B$11.4D5.4B8.4B$11.4D4.4B10.4B$12.3D3.4B12.4B$13.2D
2.4B14.4B$10.2D4.4B16.4B$9.3D3.4B18.4B$8.3D3.4B20.4B$7.3D3.4B22.4B$6.
3D3.4B7.3BAB12.4B$5.3D3.4B9.BABAB12.4B$10.4B5.B2.2B2.A.A$4.D4.3AB5.2A
B.B3A2.3A$11.A6.2A2BAB2.2A3.A$2.D7.A8.B.BA.2A2.3A$22.BA2.A.A$D24.A.A$
26.A!
#C [[ THUMBNAIL THUMBSIZE 2 PAUSE 3 AUTOSTART GPS 30 T 86 PAUSE 3 "Can't start catalyzing\nmuch before this time" T 87 "" LOOP 200 ]]
-- because you pretty much have to wait until the catalyst is close to actually interacting with the pi heptomino around T=85. Otherwise your hypothetical added catalyst will very likely change the reaction in a way that
1) fails to produce the output glider, and/or
2) causes the pi-to-2G catalyst to fail catastrophically.
There's very limited potential for interaction with the dying sparks up at the top, and if you add stuff over on the left it will have to throw a block almost ten cells to the right, without leaving any other mess. We don't have a whole lot of successful search results that look anything like that.
Also, this whole mechanism is fairly big and awkward and bulky and slow in any case. By the time you're done adding catalysts you might not actually have anything that's terribly useful. There's still a lot of hope that there's something small and nearly Spartan out there to be found, so that's where people are likely to spend the most time looking.
E.g., a fresh search along
these lines (another of your recent re-suggestions) might be a lot more likely to produce a small fast-recovering CC reflector -- possibly even one that's cheap to construct and breaks new ground in self-constructing circuitry.