Talk:List of rules investigated on Catagolue

B3/S2457

I noticed that this list is missing B3/S2457. Since I am assuming that this list is automatically generated from a text file, can someone add B3/S2457 to that and then add it to the list?

For that matter, is the file available anywhere online for people to edit? What about the program that is used to format it into a list? I think they should both be, preferably with the raw list posted on the wiki (possibly as a subpage of this one) and the script on the forums.

Gameoflifeboy 00:17, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

Added, thanks. And to answer your question, yes, this is automatically generated.

I can post both the raw list and the script used to format it. Where would the best place to put these be? On one hand I'm inclined to have them on the wiki, since that's where this articles lives as well; on the other hand the forum's where people hang out. Apple Bottom (talk) 10:08, 9 July 2016 (UTC)

I was thinking to at least have the list on the Wiki so that people could add rules to it after searching those rules, maybe under List of rules investigated on Catagolue/rulelist or another subpage of the page.

As for the script, it could be posted on the forums, with a link and instructions for use given on this talk page. Gameoflifeboy 01:03, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and posted all files on the forum. I'm not sure there's much point in making the rules list editable on-wiki, since the script reads a local copy anyway. If someone needs the raw list of rules it's very easy to re-generate from the formatted article anyway; something along the lines of cat article.txt | perl -nE 'm/census\/(.*?)\/ / and say $1' is enough. Apple Bottom (talk) 10:05, 11 July 2016 (UTC)

Splitting the table

Can this table be split into outer-totalistic and non-totalistic tables? - AwesoMan3000 (talk) 15:33, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

In case you're wondering why, I want these to be separate when Catagolue supports Generations and Larger than Life rules, as to not have a bunch of different types of rules bundled into the same place, and would also remove the need for the Outer-totalistic column, alongside the Rule integer column in the non-totalistic table. - AwesoMan3000 (talk) 16:15, 6 August 2017 (UTC)

Yes, that would certainly be possible. Sensible idea, too; I'll make a mental note to adjust my scripts to handle this. Apple Bottom (talk) 10:50, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

Done. Apple Bottom (talk) 17:02, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

Grouping equivalent rules

I've modified the script used to generate these tables to automatically group equivalent rules together. There might be bugs, so if anything's wrong, please let me know (the more details, the better). Apple Bottom (talk) 22:16, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Rule names

Where do all these rule names keep coming from, anyway? Are you just making them up? If so, I'd ask you to put them on the forums instead of adding them to this article. The LifeWiki collects established terminology etc.; it's not a breeding ground for new terminology. Apple Bottom (talk) 10:11, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

Logarithmic replicator rule is from Gun as mentioned in the edit summary, Linea and Train are from the forum threads with the respective names, alife and hlife3 are mentioned on their respective forum posts in the Close life variants thread, tEightLife is from tlife and EightLife sharing their transitions as in the other tlife variants, and HighFlock, DryFlock, Pedestrian Flock and tflock are extrapolated from flock and Life's close variants. - AwesoMan3000 (talk) 17:00, 8 September 2017 (UTC)

OK! Apple Bottom (talk) 09:58, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Re: updates

Just to quickly answer the question posed in an edit summary:

...turns out you missed out a lot actually, are you using an old backup of the page?

No; my local rules file that is used to generate this table was last updated yesterday, but I didn't get around to also updating this article then and instead deferred doing so until today. There's already been ~25 more rules investigated in the meantime, but don't fret, these will all be added in due time. Apple Bottom (talk) 15:58, 17 September 2017 (UTC)

Splitting up the page

I've split the page up into several subpages, one for each type of rule (for now). This had become necessary to avoid running into PHP's default 30 second execution time limit when doing page diffs. Apple Bottom (talk) 11:49, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Was just about to suggest this - I was having difficulty viewing the page history for updates to the tables. - AwesoMan3000 (talk) 12:19, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Update?

It seems like it's been nearly 2 months without an update. Update, please? Saka (talk) 11:30, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

The list is still being updated every week, but for technical reasons[1] the actual edits being made on the transcluded subpages now. Thanks to the magic of transclusion the main list is still staying up-to-date though, even if it's not being edited.

You'll not see these updates on your watchlist if you're only watching this page, since technically, it's not being edited, but you can just watch the transcluded pages as well. I seem to recall a user preference to automatically include "related changes" in one's watchlist, but it doesn't seem to exist on the LifeWiki and may thus not be a core MediaWiki feature.

1. Those "technical reasons" being article size and hosting-imposed resource limits; page diffs etc. for extremely large articles take more CPU time to render than PHP is being afforded, so I had to split up the whole page about two months ago. Also see the preceding section.

Apple Bottom (talk) 10:33, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

Links to forum threads for named rules without wiki pages

Self explanatory. I'm seeing lots of red links here, why don't we link them up to their threads? (For ones that have threads, like Linea) Saka (talk) 13:01, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Do you want to maintain a file mapping rulestrings (in bs notation, e.g. "b2ci3ai4c8s02ae3eijkq4iz5ar6i7e") to forum thread ids (e.g. 3202)? Ideally, one such mapping per line, with the rulestring and the thread id separated by whitespace.

Put it on Github or so and push to it on occasion, and I'll modify my scripts to automatically pull in the latest revision and use it. Apple Bottom (talk) 17:47, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

Sure. I've never used Github before, but I'll try. Saka (talk) 02:35, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

EDIT: Some rule names have spaces in them (e.g. Blocks for Days), should I use quotes?

I also couldn't find the original post for StairWorld and cb2 is a bit scattered, I listed them as N/A Saka (talk) 02:42, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

I made a github account but I have no idea what to do next. Help please? I have the text file ready Saka (talk) 03:58, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Quotes aren't necessary, but you don't need the rules' names anyway; just the rule string and the thread id will be fine, like this:

# This file contains thread ids for rule-specific forum threads on ConwayLife.com
# Format: [rulestring] [threadid]
# Lines starting with # are comments
# Empty lines will be ignored
b2ci3ai4c8s02ae3eijkq4iz5ar6i7e 3202
b3678s34678 702
...

Re: what to do next: create a repo on Github and upload the file to it (using the web interface or with Git). Then just occasionally push changes to the repo when you update your file.

Oh, and let me know where to find it. :) Apple Bottom (talk) 09:10, 25 February 2018 (UTC)

Proposal for a new column

The first user to apgsearch a rule, or for rules where that information has been lost (due to hauls getting automatically deleted in rules where not 100% of all objects are from a single user), the user to have contributed the most objects to that rule so far. This would help users find rules that they've created or searched in the past, since Catagolue has no such functions itself. 77topaz (talk) 09:16, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

Good idea in principle, but is this encyclopedic, i.e. of sufficient general interest to warrant inclusion in these lists? This strikes me as the kind of thing better confined to a user (sub-)page, or the forums.

I'll see about cooking up a script that'll generate this sort of information so I can put it on my userpage. Apple Bottom (talk) 17:38, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

EDIT: created at User:Apple Bottom/Catagolue/Top users by rule. Apple Bottom (talk) 19:32, 1 September 2018 (UTC)

Splitting up the hexagonal list

Just wanted to point out that AwesoMan3000 has decided split up the hexagonal list further into outer-totalistic, isotropic, and Generations rules. I don't think this is a bad idea, since I think it looks nicer; however, I'm pretty sure it will probably be overwritten when Apple Bottom does the script again since it hasn't been updated to split up the hexagonal rules. Ian07 (talk) 15:20, 9 December 2018 (UTC)