Scale of the Life Universe

[Mr. Missed Her]

There's an interesting internet widget called Scale of the Universe. What if we created something like that which shows the scale of CGOL objects?
Discussion of this started here.

[Mr. Missed Her]

Could even have a recursive loop at the lowest level, so that whenever you think you've gotten down to a single cell and there's no point in going further, objects turn out to be made out of OTCA metapixels, so you can keep zooming in after all.

It's an interesting idea. But it'd be hard to work around how there's objects bigger than an OTCA metapixel. When at the level of common patterns, like block, blinker, glider, ect, you'd see a long, less than one cell thick line that would be Gemini. I'm thinking that maybe you could do it with very large unit cells, (I'm sure there's a way to expand OTCAMP.) but would the unit cells just look like squares at that point?

[dvgrn]

We do have plenty of things to populate a Scale of the Life Universe, starting maybe with one each of the different spaceship types:

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glider
lightweight spaceship
loafer
25P3H1V0.2
copperhead
30P5H2V0
weekender
37P4H1V0
spider
56P6H1V0
58P5H1V1
64P2H1V0
77P6H1V1
lobster
3-engine Cordership
spaghetti monster

waterbear
caterloopillar(s)
centipede
caterpillar
Parallel HBK
original half-baked knightship
HBK gun
0hd Demonoid
10hd Demonoid
Ohd Demonoid gun
linear propagator
Gemini
Gemini gun

i threw in a few of the macro-spaceship guns, because at least they don't look like boring featureless lines, the way a lot of the actual spaceships do.

There are a lot more patterns of various sizes that could be added and advertised, hopefully to a wider audience, starting with the remaining items in Golly's Help > Online Archives > Very Large Patterns collection. Should be possible to fill in the gap between the spagetti monster and the waterbear fairly nicely, anyway -- I'm not sure yet where there might be other significant gaps.

I'm planning to check in a pile of additions to that Very Large Patterns collection, by the way -- Jormungant's high-bandwidth telegraph and associated ticker tape, Coban's programmable 8-bit computer, an optimized glider-to-weekender converter, improved universal megacells, and so on -- I'm looking for reminders on what else I should throw in there. Might as well collect suggestions here in this thread for Scale of the Life Universe patterns as well.

The Internet widget includes a nice feature, that you can click on each object and get some more interesting details about it.

We might want to figure out how to do something similar for the Scale of the Life Universe project -- which I think is maybe a vote against a YouTube video and in favor of a similar Internet widget, or possibly a Golly 2.9 overlay script. Might as well start collecting short paragraphs for patterns, in either case, borrowed from the LifeWiki and elsewhere.

[Mr. Missed Her]

I'd include a few more of the small, natural objects, like block, blinker, and eater 1. They are significant in CGOL, and doesn't seem right to leave them out. Here's a list that I've added a few items to, along with a few descriptions:

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[*]blinker
[*]block
glider - This was the first spaceship discovered, because it is so common. People try to make things by crashing these together in certain ways.
[*]eater 1
[*]3 types of weightships (instead of just LWSS)
loafer - This ship moves at c/7, slow for a ship that is this small. What loafers couldn't discover it until 2013?
25P3H1V0.2
copperhead
30P5H2V0
[*]Gosper glider gun
weekender
37P4H1V0
[*]pulsar
spider
56P6H1V0
58P5H1V1
64P2H1V0
77P6H1V1
lobster
3-engine Cordership
spaghetti monster
[*]original unit cell
[*]computer screen at 1 cell:1 pixel
[*]OTCA metapixel
[*]Gemini constructor part - The gemini was the first knightship, or a ship that moves neither diagonally nor orthogonally. It works by creating another copy of itself and then deleting the old copy. To see the whole Gemini, zoom out [x] orders of magnitude
[*]Calcyman's metacells (Megacells?)
waterbear
caterloopillar(s)
centipede
caterpillar
Parallel HBK
original half-baked knightship
HBK gun
0hd Demonoid
10hd Demonoid
Ohd Demonoid gun
linear propagator
whole Gemini - The whole Gemini spaceship is so large, that if you show one end on your screen at 1 cell:1 pixel, the other end would be 4/5 of a kilometer away! Except that most screens aren't that big. It's this big because it has all the information that controls the Gemini halves in a long stream of gliders.
Gemini gun

Hope they're all in the right order.

[gmc_nxtman]

I think this topic deserves to be revisited. It would be a very informative tool for newcomers to GoL, and it would be quite interesting to see how macro-patterns compare in size. Items could be historically significant, or just a good measure of scale. I think there are is an interesting gap here though:

spaghetti monster...
[*]original unit cell

There are definitely some none-trivial patterns that can fit between that gap, although they might blur the line between "discovered" and "engineered". Some small guns of non-standard spaceships may be sufficient (although those are definitely in the 'engineeered' category anyway)

[*]Gemini constructor part

I think instead of this, we could include the

Here is a revised list of macro-patterns (hopefully in actual scale order0

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Calcyman's metacells (Megacells?)
waterbear
c/92 caterloopillar?
Parallel HBK
centipede
0hd Demonoid
original half-baked knightship
shield bug
caterpillar
Ohd Demonoid gun
10hd Demonoid
linear propagator
whole Gemini 
HBK gun
Gemini gun

[Saka]

I think we should add "cell" at the beginning

[blah]

I think instead of this, we could include the

Yeah, the is a pretty important pattern.

[gmc_nxtman]

I think we should add "cell" at the beginning

Seconded.

Yeah, the is a pretty important pattern.

Sorry, I meant to put that instead of the gemini constructor we should include something like a simple single-channel construction arm.

[BlinkerSpawn]

I'm a bit leery of having so many small patterns, as although I realize they all have some sort of significance I think it would be best to attempt to maintain a fairly regular distribution of pattern sizes as we move up and down the logarithmic scale.

[gameoflifemaniac]

Tried to make an Scale of Life Universe in Golly, but I accidentally clicked on envelope.lua and everything was surrounded by grey cells. So i deleted the script

[BlinkerSpawn]

Tried to make an Scale of Life Universe in Golly, but I accidentally clicked on envelope.lua and everything was surrounded by grey cells. So i deleted the script

"The script" being envelope.lua?

[gameoflifemaniac]

Tried to make an Scale of Life Universe in Golly, but I accidentally clicked on envelope.lua and everything was surrounded by grey cells. So i deleted the script

"The script" being envelope.lua?

Yea