Guam's CollisionsSearch utility
Posted: June 6th, 2016, 12:22 pm
This announcement has been a painfully long time in coming. I owe an apology or two to Guam, who some time ago kindly supplied me with the full source code and impressively complete operating instructions for his search utility. This is the program that found the semi-Snark in 2013, along with an unprecedented number (at the time!) of new Herschel conduits. It's a Windows-only utility at the moment -- a compiled Delphi program, same as the grand old pre-Golly CA simulator/editors Life32 and Mirek's Cellebration.
The documentation included versions in Russian and in English, and I volunteered to clean up the English documentation before posting the whole package publicly.
This was back toward the end of last year, just as I started a new job, and also decided to attempt a tenth-anniversary update of the Life Lexicon... which I can now finally get back to again. I've been expecting to find time to finish that promised documentation work, every week for some months now.
-- Well, the CollisionsSearch documentation may still not really be done, but at this point I should let someone else proofread my proofreading job, and get this search utility out into the hands of people who will actually try it out!
CollisionsSearch has an impressive GUI, and should be particularly useful for finding Spartan constructs. Or near-Spartan constructible circuitry, anyway. The basic algorithm seems to be along the lines of CatForce, but with a lot of useful options for adding limitations to allow a deeper exploration of the search space.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually attempted to run many searches with the program yet, myself. So I've included the original Word-document version of the English documentation, as well as Word and PDF versions of my re-translations, in case I've missed the mark with some of my re-wording attempts.
If anyone has trouble downloading or extracting the embedded .exe files in the attached ZIP, let me know and I'll see if I can work out an alternate delivery mechanism. Questions, comments, documentation bug reports, search results, and project files for successful or unsuccessful searches are all appreciated. If I make any new changes to the docs I'll update the date stamp in the ZIP filename.
Happy hunting!
The documentation included versions in Russian and in English, and I volunteered to clean up the English documentation before posting the whole package publicly.
This was back toward the end of last year, just as I started a new job, and also decided to attempt a tenth-anniversary update of the Life Lexicon... which I can now finally get back to again. I've been expecting to find time to finish that promised documentation work, every week for some months now.
-- Well, the CollisionsSearch documentation may still not really be done, but at this point I should let someone else proofread my proofreading job, and get this search utility out into the hands of people who will actually try it out!
CollisionsSearch has an impressive GUI, and should be particularly useful for finding Spartan constructs. Or near-Spartan constructible circuitry, anyway. The basic algorithm seems to be along the lines of CatForce, but with a lot of useful options for adding limitations to allow a deeper exploration of the search space.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually attempted to run many searches with the program yet, myself. So I've included the original Word-document version of the English documentation, as well as Word and PDF versions of my re-translations, in case I've missed the mark with some of my re-wording attempts.
If anyone has trouble downloading or extracting the embedded .exe files in the attached ZIP, let me know and I'll see if I can work out an alternate delivery mechanism. Questions, comments, documentation bug reports, search results, and project files for successful or unsuccessful searches are all appreciated. If I make any new changes to the docs I'll update the date stamp in the ZIP filename.
Happy hunting!