yujh wrote: ↑October 10th, 2020, 5:58 am
Is there possibility for a ‘transparent glider reflector’ for a single glider?
Sure, if I'm understanding the question right. One of the best hopes for improvement in self-constructing circuitry would be if someone can turn up a set of scattered common still lifes that all happen to return to their previous positions after being hit by a glider -- like the
sidesnagger, but also emitting one or (much preferable) two gliders.
The still lifes could all be transparent, in which case you could build strictly volatile oscillators at whatever period the reaction's recovery time supports. But it would still be almost as big a discovery if some still lifes acted as standard catalysts.
This is a reachable search space, where everything beyond the reach of
sngdetect, and more recently CatForce, is pretty much unexplored. The odds of success don't seem too terribly high, but there
could be a pattern of half a dozen blocks or something that regenerates itself perfectly and puts out a glider.
The search task is highly parallelizable. For example, it would be easy to divide an enumeration of all constellations inside a 16x16 box into manageable-sized chunks, and keep sending the next chunk out to customized apgsearch instances. Just doing this as a custom symmetry and reporting to the current Catagolue would turn up some new stuff occasionally, so that might be enough to get people to keep contributing even if the Spartan-stable-reflector part of the search didn't turn up anything for months or years, as it probably wouldn't.
But we'd need some changes to apgsearch so that it could recognize a stable reflector when it saw one, and to deal with the enumeration details so that the distributed search could maybe eventually be exhaustive instead of just random incomplete coverage of the search space.
