Intuitive understanding?

[confocaloid]

Helping intuitive understanding is much more important than "documenting existing common usage".

If readers are confused by counterintuitive/vague/ambiguous terminology, then no amount of lexicographic activity will fix that.

edit: The purpose of this topic is to provide a place for various people to discuss

• the current level of "beginner-friendliness" and "reader-friendliness" of this website (including both the forums and the wiki, despite significant differences between posting something on the forums and explaining the same thing in a wiki article)
• existing possibilities for that to be improved, in order to help the beginners and curious readers to understand what is going on, using their intuition from wider fields (math in general; science in general; real life), without asking them to unnecessarily spend lots of time studying local terminologies and quirks and lurking through forum threads.

Relevant for wiki issues, and probably for some forum issues as well: LifeWiki:Style guide

[Sokwe]

Can you elaborate on the purpose of this topic?

[confocaloid]

I edited the post.

[H. H. P. M. P. Cole]

Helping intuitive understanding is much more important than "documenting existing common usage".

I need a triple like button for this.

Part of the reason why I joined the forums is to improve on already-existing terminology, but you have convinced me that the already-existing terminology needs a complete makeover.

I understand that many others disagree with you on this issue, but I am probably one of the only forum users who agree with you.

For others:

Here is the terminology that confocaloid is proposing:

A transition is an ordered pair (current cellstate, new cellstate). There are n^2 possible transitions in a n-state rule.

A condition is a specification of current states of cells in the cell's neighbourhood, under some equivalence class.

A transition rule is a combination of a condition and a transition: simply an ordered tuple (a, b, c), where (a, c) is the transition and b is the condition.

Then a CA is a set of transition rules where for every a, b, there is a unique transition rule with those a, b.

If this is not intuitive, I don't know what is. Even Lifeline uses it (pointed out to me by confocaloid).

Also, these definitions line up with the ordinary English meanings of each word, making it much, much more intuitive.

I agree that we should come up with a new 'green writeup'.

About beginner-friendliness, one can write at the top of some OCA pages something like:

This page assumes knowledge of [[Hensel notation]].

That way people can look up the page for Hensel notation. One can also utilize what the Xenharmonic Wiki does, having separate beginner and advanced/expert pages for some topics.

But this raises a question: what does one mean by 'advanced'? In CA theory? Mathematics? One solution is to assume CA theoreticians might read the advanced pages, and mathematicians could read 'mathematicians' pages' or something like that. These are all just half formed ideas, and I would love to hear others' opinions on these ideas.

Also, because of this argument, my OCA book project will now be discontinued, probably for an infinite time.