POTD 2010 Nomination Thread

[dvgrn]

I'd suggest "single-channel universal construction" as an entry

Can someone with more knowledge of this entry and its uses (and its discoverers) provide a description for it?

Bit of a run-on, improvements welcome:

• #35 Single-channel universal construction: construction-arm elbow operations discovered by Simon Ekström that allowed for radically simplified designs for self-constructing patterns, with recipes for large patterns encoded in single streams of gliders -- combined with a fully automated compiler (Adam P. Goucher's slsparse) that can produce on-demand recipes for a wide variety of inputs.

Finally, we need to decide how long to allow for voting. We typically give it two or three weeks for the Pattern of the Year competitions.

Maybe just leave the voting open for the month of August -- i.e., close the voting as soon as it's September everywhere on the planet? It's not like we'll have any trouble getting this round of voting done before the next POTD competition comes around.

[wwei23]

If nomination is still open, I'd like to suggest the cloverleaf interchange soup as a candidate.

[dvgrn]

If nomination is still open, I'd like to suggest the cloverleaf interchange soup as a candidate.

Catagolue is definitely a huge omission from the POTD list. Maybe the entry could be generalized like this? (similar to the last few pattern-category nominiations):

• #36: Catagolue soup discoveries: Adam P. Goucher's huge online database of soup census results, compiled via long-term distributed search efforts. Some examples, out of many thousands of discoveries, include the record-breaking 56-bit cloverleaf interchange still life and a Schick engine, both appearing from random 16x16 asymmetric soups, and several pufferfish appearances in symmetric soups.

[Sokwe]

Bit of a run-on, improvements welcome...

Catagolue is definitely a huge omission from the POTD list. Maybe the entry could be generalized like this?

I think both descriptions are a bit too verbose (when compared to other entries). I shortened the first and basically rewrote the second:

• #35 Single-channel universal construction: construction-arm elbow operations that allowed for radically simplified designs for self-constructing patterns, with recipes for large patterns encoded in single streams of gliders (by Simon Ekström and Adam P. Goucher)
• #36 Catagolue soup discoveries: soup census results that include new record-breaking methuselahs, the first natural occurances of many objects, and the discoveries of several new symmetric oscillators (by Adam P. Goucher, Rob Liston, John Goodman, carybe, et al.)

I also propose moving Garden of Eden 6 to a general Garden of Eden entry that also includes some of Steven Eker's new Gardens of Eden. The entry would look like this:

• #25 New Gardens of Eden: Gardens of Eden with record-breaking dimensions, orphan sizes, and density (by Steven Eker, Marjin Heule, Christiaan Hartman, Kees Kwekkeboom and Alain Noels)

I also wonder about having an entry for c/5 diagonal rakes when discoveries such as weekender distaff seem (to me at least) more significant. Perhaps these could be combined into an engineless puffer/rake entry. Something like this:

• #28 New engineless puffers and rakes: Engineless puffers of speeds c/6 orthogonal and 3c/7 orthogonal and rakes of speeds c/5 diagonal, 2c/7 orthogonal, and c/10 orthogonal (by Nico Brown, Ivan Fomichev, Matthias Merzenich, and Luka Okanishi)

There were already three votes cast before I locked the voting thread. Due to these updates, those votes will be invalid. My thought for now is to edit each post to add a note at the top marking them as invalid. The respective users could then update their posts with their new votes and remove the note.