But... the point of everything I said in my most recent post is that I didn't intend anyone to interpret my phrase that way, and that I don't want you to interpret my phrase that way. I was trying as hard as I could to get that point across to you. You didn't quote or respond to any of those parts of my post, so it's hard to tell if you read or understood them.confocaloid wrote: ↑September 25th, 2023, 12:57 amAs far as I can tell, the most sensible way to interpret your phrase 'very long established definition of "drifter"', is to read it as referring to a written definition, presumably in Life Lexicon and/or LifeWiki.
You're really, really good at drawing flawless logical conclusions starting from a set of premises. But sometimes your choice of premises is just plain not workable, due to taking things out of context. With bad premises, not surprisingly, you won't necessarily arrive at conclusions that the community can agree with.
In this case, your argument seems to be based on the premise that when I say "definition", I must always mean something like "the LifeWiki definition as currently written, interpreted literally". I don't accept that premise, of course. The LifeWiki isn't always perfect, which is why we keep trying to make it a little better. The LifeWiki won't always have a completely correct or complete definition of a given term.
Quite often there's a deep community consensus about an aspect of a definition that isn't explicitly called out in the LifeWiki or Life Lexicon. We're all volunteers around here, and it may not even have occurred to anyone that a particular misunderstanding could arise from the current wording.
A less literal reading of either definition does support my claim, I believe -- but it's necessary to look at the context and the history of the use of the term, rather than just applying logic to the very first sentence of each definition without using any of the other information.Apparently, in this case both LifeWiki and Life Lexicon give essentially the same definition. This definition does not, in fact, require a non-empty background.
TL,DR: if your phrase 'very long established definition of "drifter"' even means anything, then it has to mean a written definition, and neither LifeWiki nor Life Lexicon support your claim.
Dean Hickerson's 'dr' / 'drifter' search program was optimized to find perturbations traveling through non-empty background patterns. Reported 'dr' search results are billiard-table oscillators, wires for various signal types, fizzles, elbows -- that kind of thing.
Other programs are optimized to find spaceships. If 'dr' has ever been used to find a spaceship, it was a very rare occurrence -- the kind of exception that pretty much proves the rule that 'dr' doesn't search for spaceships.
So, in pretty much all past usage, the term "drifter" has referred to "the kind of traveling perturbations that Dean Hickerson's 'dr' program finds". It has seldom or never been used to refer to spaceships.
This means that it's just plain not a workable idea to suddenly start to use "drifter" to refer to spaceships. The term "drifter" has always implicitly excluded spaceships up to now, because of the context I've described in the last four paragraphs. An overly literal reading of the first sentence of the definition does indeed include spaceships -- but that fact is not relevant, because it completely ignores all of this real-Life context.
