Mandelbrot wrote:Personally, I think a good starting point for me would be putting a
bubble inside of a
grayship, but I don't know if that's too hard or easy or what, so I'd like some help/feedback.
As AforAmpere says, "
unless there is some C/2 Against-the-grain bubble", you might run into some trouble with that one.
I mean, you can put a pattern like that together with no problem at all... but at the moment negative spaceships in zebra stripes are only known to move at 2c/3 or light speed, and greyships can't move faster than c/2 though they may be slower.
If ship and bubble speed don't match, the construction isn't going to last very long (though that could be fun to watch, too, of course.)
To match the bubble speed to the greyship speed, you'd have to use an against-the-grain grayship and invent a
new slower kind of negative spaceship (it's been discussed before).
Mandelbrot wrote:Hello. My name is Mandelbrot and I really want to be a helpful part of the CGOL community, but I've never really done something like this before, and I really wanna help find cool patterns, particularly oscillators. However, I don't really know how...
I kind of think my previous attempts to answer
questions like this tend to scare people off, but maybe I can learn from my mistakes.
The link in the previous paragraph was basically a pointer to a
recent open problems list, with the usual difficulty that open problems are the ones that are so difficult that not even the experts know how to solve them (!).
If we try to stick with the "searching for oscillators" idea, well, it looks like nobody has tackled writing a tutorial for the relevant search software yet
(LifeWiki Tutorials page). We should really fix that. There's a link for "WLS", but it's red, and maybe JLS (JavaLifeSearch) would be the version of lifesrc that's accessible to the largest number of people, anyway.
Maybe a set of about half a dozen problems, with increasing difficulty, would be a good way to put together a tutorial. We've had a few cases covered recently that could be borrowed for that purpose, like
On Discord, Blinkerspawn wrote:I'm trying to find a specific p4 using WLS. How can I make it so if it's oriented like / in gen 0 it's the same pattern oriented like \ in gen 2?
Start with a few problems like "complete this p3 billiard table", showing what all the JLS settings look like.
Then maybe work up to showing how to find a diagonally-symmetric period-8 oscillator that makes a nice from-the-side domino spark and fits in a 10x10 bounding box... basically to get the idea across that whatever weird spark you might want an oscillator to have, you can certainly search for it, and you might even find it.
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... Of course, speaking now for the "me" part of the CGoL community, I can think of all kinds of ways that someone could be helpful. It's just that it's mostly a lot of rather tedious maintenance work that I don't want to do (all of) myself -- like reviewing
huge piles of LifeWiki articles and seeing if anything new from the Life Lexicon needs to be added, or building templates for the 64 remaining glider guns in LifeHistory format to finish the automatic p14-p999 gun-builder script.
That's certainly very honorable work, though -- and for sure anyone who works on a project like that will know a lot more about CGoL by the time they're done!