Talk:28P7.3

This page seems to have gone pretty far overboard. What in Conway's name are those last two gallery patterns doing there? If you have a choice between a big complicated thing and a simple eater, why would you ever choose the big complicated irrelevant period-limited thing?

Patterns like these seem to me to have some serious potential for causing confusion: people might well think that this is what is needed to make a p7 bouncer or bumper need to work. Why else would these patterns ever have been built?

Since a fishhook eater is in fact better in every possible way for both the eating and the reflection-assisting purposes, it seems kind of dangerous to show these patterns in a gallery as if they might be useful somehow. What's to stop you from adding similar eater and reflector patterns as "uses" for an integral with hook, for example?

Something definitely should stop you from doing anything more along those lines. It seems a good bit worse than just adding useless information -- it's downright misleading. Adding a pattern implies that the mechanism in question is worth documenting -- i.e., that it is, or was at some point in the past, a good way of accomplishing some goal. Either that's just plain not true in this case, or I've somehow completely missed the point. Dvgrn (talk) 03:45, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

It’s just a property. I added it because it is a property of this oscillator, not because it has been used for any purpose. Entity Valkyrie (talk) 05:39, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Right -- that's exactly what has me badly worried. If we try to document every property of every object, very quickly it becomes impossible to find the interesting/useful/relevant stuff among all the clutter.

Up until now, if someone has taken the time to add a pattern to a gallery, it's because the pattern is a good illustration of some unique or at least unusual feature -- something that the object in question does better than any other object. So the uses of eater 1 are documented in eater 1. You could maybe put a text link to eater 1 from other objects that happen to be able to function like an eater 1.

But if an eater 1 is good enough, other objects will very rarely get used. A pattern illustrating a reaction implies to readers that the reaction is useful or interesting in some way -- so it's seriously misleading to create a pattern illustrating 28P7.3 behaving like a simple eater.

In other words... if it's a good idea to add embedded patterns to illustrate 28P7.3's properties of acting like an eater, and helping out with bumpers and bouncers, then presumably it's an equally good idea to add equivalent patterns to integral, integral with tub, integral with hook, block on big table, beehive on big table, moose antlers, elevener, fourteener, and on and on.

Unfortunately then all those patterns might eventually get collected by the (semi-)automatic pattern-upload system and end up in the LifeWiki pattern collection. They wouldn't show anything new or interesting, so ultimately they would just be annoying clutter.

Most of the objects in the above list already contain links saying that they "can act like an eater 1". If someone wants to know what "acting like an eater 1" looks like, they click on the link... so then they find that information in the place where it belongs, in the eater 1 article. Please don't get in the habit of duplicating that kind of information to other random places where it won't ever be useful, and will just tend to confuse people. Dvgrn (talk) 15:16, 6 December 2018 (UTC)