calcyman wrote:I suspect we now need a variant of Hersrch which allows multiple different transients (especially now that the number of indecomposable Herschel conduits is now infinite).
Definitely. We just need Karel Suhajda to come out of retirement and build JHersrch, as he was hoping to do
a couple of years back. That was before Snarks, let alone syringes... Now it would be nice to be able to say, e.g.,
"I have a SW-traveling tandem glider at (0,0,T=0), or it could be just a single glider instead. I want a north-traveling Herschel at (-30,53,T=753+8N). Here are the obstacles attached to the start point, and here are the obstacles that will move with the end point. What's the simplest way to get the signal there with Spartan/non-Spartan [delete whichever is inapplicable] circuitry?"
Almost half of the time the solution for the above might be a simple arrangement of Snarks and a syringe... and the other half of the time the output Herschel will be the wrong color, so it will need just one more conduit at the end, unless that gets in the way of some obstacle somehow, in which case things get more complicated.
I'd really love to have a precalculated lookup table available for each combination of input and output (object, orientation), so that it would be possible to drag the output object around in a GUI, maybe somewhat along the lines of the Seeds of Destruction Game, and see the candidate conduit adjust itself in real time.
However, it might still be a good intermediate step to build all the composite H-to-H conduits that include one or more B-to-Bs and fit inside 100x100 or so, and add those to Hersrch along with all the other recent new discoveries. Some usable information will come out of that, about which conduits can precede or follow the new additions.
The other intermediate step is to finally collect all lane and timing statistics for all of the known H-to-Gs, in a form that a script could use -- because really one of the most common situations is the opposite of the above scenario: I have a Herschel, and what I want is exactly the right output glider.
I have the H-to-G classifier script nicely started now, but I'm out of spare time again (funny how that keeps happening). So it may be several weeks before I get the H-to-G collection all sorted out.