With your current set of rakes - and your proven creativity in finding more of those - those 18 gliders should not be that ridiculously exepnsive ...dvgrn wrote:Looks like the lack of a decent HWSS recipe has stalled progress on the 31c/240 ship for the last couple of weeks. Think I should just go ahead and build an HWSS rake with the horribly inefficient 18-glider recipe (which didn't come from the search program, so it will end up having a ridiculously high cost in rephasers)?dvgrn wrote:With a more expensive way of building the blocks, it's easy to string together a workable 18-glider HWSS seed recipe.
Not yet. I'll set one up today ... let's see how deep it can dig.dvgrn wrote: -- Or is there another search still in the works that might turn up a more reasonable HWSS seed or two? I suggested cutting the bounding box to maybe 15x15, both to find smaller seeds and to reach out into the COST=15..20 space that hasn't been searched much yet (I don't think).
Bitting the user is NYI (not yet implemented), anyway ...dvgrn wrote: But the Half-Baked Knightship project has been distracting me, so I haven't gotten desperate enough yet to download the latest sscs and try it myself...!
Well. Simply put, it places the reaction-to-analyse in the middle of an empty universe and runs it for a fixed number of generations (the universe is choosen large enough so that even an 1c explosion won't reach the edges).dvgrn wrote: Another question while I'm at it: what exactly does sscs do with patterns that never settle? A new discussion has brought up the question of when the first switch engine makes an appearance in the slow-salvo search tree? Presumably this would be an unweighted search starting from just a blonk (block or blinker), with a bounding box probably at least big enough to hold a pi explosion.
After those N generations sscs searches for a well defined list of known objects (currently the "natural" space ships) and removes them from the result, backtracking each object to the first generation it appears in.
The reaction is discarded if:
+ an "unwanted" ship appears ("unwanted" is configurable, of corse).
+ the remains after removing any found ships has to big a bounding box.
+ the remains are not (yet) periodic after N generations (or have a higher period then defined as MAX_PERIOD)
Currently, any stuff like puffers or rakes won't fit this search. Even if you'll add the engine of puffer to the list of objects to look for, the ash will not be removed and will mess everything up.
Besides the "objects" my program looks for have to be strictly periodic: still lifes, oscillators, ships.
On the other hand: if we don't care about the remaining result (which would be labled as "pruned" or "unstable", probably) we could define a switch engine as object to look for (bit kludgy, I think ...) - have to think it over ...
dvgrn wrote: Technically it wouldn't matter much if the intermediate reactions emitted gliders, as long as the output gliders didn't get in the way of input gliders -- but that starts to get more complicated to code, unless you just ignore output gliders and check recipes for consistency later. Just the simplest possible search would probably give useful results. I'm betting there's a switch engine within six slow gliders of a blonk -- but now I'm wondering if I'm being too conservative and I should bet on a five-glider recipe instead...!