LifeWiki:Tiki bar/Archive/2020

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The following is an archive of tiki bar discussions started in 2020.

CiteDiscord template?

Was thinking about this since User:Dvgrn added a Discord citation to the Max article. Would there be any objections to a template to cite the Conwaylife Lounge Discord server? It is a public server, after all, and there have been quite a few notable discoveries and developments announced there over the years. Ian07 (talk) 17:53, 16 February 2020 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. I'd also like a Templates Cheat Sheet page under How to Contribute somewhere, probably just a section in Help:Templates. There are examples there of how to use some templates, but for many of them I currently just go hunting around randomly in articles until I find a good example of how it's used, and then copy and modify that. As the number of templates increases, this is starting to seem more and more, um, suboptimal. Dvgrn (talk) 15:06, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
I know it's been two months, but Template:CiteDiscord is now up and running on the Max article. Thoughts? Ian07 (talk) 14:12, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Black ribbon

Briefly popping out of the woodwork to mourn Rich --- I had the idea of adding a black ribbon in the lower right corner of pages. This is added by a bit of code in MediaWiki:Common.js, with some supporting CSS in MediaWiki:Common.css. To turn this off again, simply comment out the line that says 

$( document ).ready(function() {
    console.log( "ready!" );
    addMourningRibbon();
});

near the bottom of MediaWiki:Common.js. (Actually, commenting out the call to addMourningRibbon there will be enough.) Leave the rest of the code and the CSS in though; that way the ribbon can be reused next time there is a death in the community. (The link on the ribbon is set a little further up, and can easily be adjusted as needed.)

N.B. --- the ribbon itself is a bit fiddly and doesn't always appear; I suspect this has to do with page caching, but I know too little about Javascript, Mediawiki and all that jazz to get to the bottom of it. Perhaps someone else who knows more can help. Using jQuery (which, thankfully, is included in MediaWiki) fixed this, so we should now have a ribbon on all pages, always. Apple Bottom (talk) 10:13, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

The black ribbon has been there for over ten days now; anyone want to suggest an appropriate total time period for it? I wandered over to MediaWiki:Common.js to see what would have to be done to turn it off, but found that I didn't have permission:
Permissions for editing of sitewide CSS/JS/JSON files were recently separated from the editinterface right.
If you do not understand why you are getting this error, see mw:MediaWiki_1.32/interface-admin.
Luckily I had permission to give myself permission, so I can now comment out the relevant line. The Internet suggests there are common 7-day and 30-day traditional mourning periods. Dvgrn (talk) 21:32, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
10 days seems fine to me. And yes, I had the same issue with permissions. Bit weird that MediaWiki doesn't give the relevant right to admins by default, but perhaps this is so that admins who're not aware of what they're doing won't accidentally break things. Apple Bottom (talk) 21:33, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

LifeViewer and RLE on OCA subpages

I was just looking at some experimental pages that Hunting/Ultimium has put together for LeapLife. For example, the small knightship in LeapLife is called a "lepa", so it's presumably going to go under OCA:LeapLife/Lepa.

But that brings up all kinds of questions. Look at Hunting's experimental Lepa page. If RLE is added in the RLE: namespace for a lepa, and for all the other things Hunting will want to document, then those patterns will end up in the main pattern collection, right? That doesn't seem like such a good idea. It would be nice to be able to put RLE someplace where LifeViewer can still find it, but it doesn't end up in the main LifeWiki pattern collection. We only have a few non-Life patterns so far, like Bomber, but it seems as if things could get out of control pretty fast if people want to add LifeViewer support for OCA pattern articles.

It seems like some different templates might be needed, to point to the alternate RLE namespace (if that gets created), and to get rid of irrelevant stuff like the links to Catagolue syntheses which won't exist for OCA patterns.

Thoughts on this? Would it be better to skip the templates, and just recommend that OCA patterns should keep their RLEs directly in the articles, as part of embedded LifeViewer text? Then I think the "RLE: here Plaintext: here" template won't work too well, and an alternate embedded-LifeViewer template for OCA patterns might be a good idea. (?) Dvgrn (talk) 16:09, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

I think there should be a separate category, say OCARLE: and an option in the template |rle = oca for checking specifically under that header. Either that or one of the three other options:
  • Removing the pattern collection.
  • Creating a new wiki for other cellular automata.
  • Excluding all OCA RLE pages from the collection.
I agree with OCARLE. Ultimium (talk) 03:15, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Giving a quick search for RLE:bg gives 5 RLE pages as well, all in LeapLife. I think those should be excluded even if the others can't be, especially if I'm going to create more. (and Hunting's too, afaik there's only RLE:Lepa and RLE:Crawfish so that shouldn't be too hard) Bubblegum (talk) 18:25, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
I don't object to either of these ideas, just want to point out that the latter option actually won't require the creation of a new template - if rle is specified instead of pname, the links won't appear. Ian07 (talk) 21:24, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
I prefer to use a seperate collection instead of the RLE embedded in the page, and a template for OCA patterns, for, um, for no reason. I mean they will be easier to access and manage. Ultimium (talk) 06:11, 8 April 2020 (UTC)
So far, the only good way to add patterns to OCA pages is what Hunting/Ultimium has done, e.g., with User:Ultimium/LeapWiki/Crawfish. But this currently means that the crawfish RLE is going to get added to the omnibus RLE collection downloadable from the main page. There are currently 66 OCA patterns scattered in among the 2300+ Life patterns. Might it be a good idea to split out all OCA patterns and provide a separate downloadable collection?

[[RLE

I'm just mimicking Apple Bottom's Day & Night Wiki. I agree, we should split out all OCA patterns. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ultimium (talk • contribs)
Also it might be worth adjusting the template used there somehow, to clearly label the crawfish spaceship in the infobox as being in a non-B3/S23 rule. (?) Dvgrn (talk) 13:49, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
I like the current idea of adding a new OCA RLE category so they won't get lumped into the B3/S23 stuff. Yes, I think adjusting the infobox template to make it more visible that the pattern is not a CGoL pattern is worth doing. Also, there are some RLEs I'm using in some of my user pages for OCA patterns. They are RLE:Smosmos, RLE:Sakaphipush, RLE:Sakacapush, RLE:Sakaw2, and RLE:Sakasaladc8 if I didn't miss any. Saka (talk) 13:42, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
I've compiled the list of OCA RLE pages here: RLE:Ttetrominotlife, RLE:Pole2rotor, RLE:B36s245replicator, RLE:Pole3rotor, RLE:Pole4rotor, RLE:2x2glider, RLE:Awesoman3000/10p84h2v2, RLE:Lepa (hunting version), RLE:Bglepa (bubblegum version), RLE:Pedestrianlifep106gun, RLE:Mazeperiod2, RLE:Briansbrainp3, RLE:Jellyfish, RLE:Sakaw2 (i was surprised that this works), RLE:Awesoman3000/9p7h2v2, RLE:Replicator (highlife's), RLE:Bgpsgriddleblock, RLE:Tlifegatekid, RLE:2x2linepuffer, RLE:Bgrigel, RLE:2x2stills, RLE:Bgrollor, RLE:Highlifefourboats, RLE:Bomberpredecessor, RLE:Sakasaladc8 (same thing), RLE:Awesoman3000/ant, RLE:Dayandnightbutterfly, RLE:Mazewickstretcher, RLE:Lfodmoon, RLE:2x2period2oscillators, RLE:Awesoman3000/hawk, RLE:Smosmos (saka why these line-break tags with wrong-side slashes), RLE:Gemsc5648, RLE:Dayandnightbug, RLE:Dayandnightfatbug, RLE:Dayandnightsnail, RLE:Replicatorpredecessor (highlife again), RLE:Sakacapush (you know the drill), RLE:Crawfish, RLE:Movepuffer, RLE:Dayandnightflameball, RLE:Drylifeflowergarden, RLE:B36s245spaceships, RLE:Highlifereplicatorxp96, RLE:B36s245-14c300spaceship, RLE:Bgstar, RLE:Sakaphipush (i swear, all of saka's rles do this), RLE:B36s245gun, RLE:Movestilllifes, RLE:Lifehistoryexample (does this count?), RLE:Dayandnightmilkbone, RLE:Dayandnightfireball (please ab get better names), RLE:Jasonsbow, RLE:Dayandnightrocket, RLE:Dayandnightp60fireball (...), RLE:Dayandnightp120fireball (is the fireball like a variable-speed ss or what), RLE:Dayandnighttotempole, RLE:B36s245-28c1200spaceship, RLE:Dayandnightp220fireball (aaa)
I probably missed some so great
Also RLE:1234_synth uses b2s23 instead of b3s23 so that's just lovely Bubblegum (talk) 05:06, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

"Non-Lifelike" CAs -- cleanup suggested

This post by BokaBB got me looking at the rule pages that have been collected in the OCA namespace. Category:Life-like cellular automata includes several isotropic non-totalistic rules (OCA:GlideLife, OCA:Goat Flock, OCA:Just Friends, OCA:Salad, OCA:Snowflakes, OCA:Tlife, and OCA:Wlife, so far, and I might have missed something.) There seems to be standard wording in all of these saying " {Rule R} is a non-totalistic Life-like cellular automaton". But this just plain isn't right: a non-totalistic CA can't be Life-like.

The standard wording links to Non-totalistic Life-like cellular automaton, which shouldn't really exist because technically there is no such thing. I guess the right name for that article should probably be just Non-totalistic cellular automaton, and "Life-like" should also be removed from Isotropic non-totalistic Life-like cellular automaton and Non-isotropic_Life-like_cellular_automaton (both the titles and the article text).

Does anyone have any objection if I do a bunch of editing to fix this, before the problem gets any worse? Or does someone really want to LifeWiki-officially redefine what "Life-like" means? The current definition is so widely accepted that it's even on Wikipedia: "Life-like" implies an outer-totalistic rule, so it's much more limited than the space of isotropic non-totalistic rules.

I'd like to add a couple of new LifeWiki categories (or have someone competent do it for me): one for "Other Cellular Automata" in general (Life-like and isotropic NT rules), and one for isotropic NT rules specifically. At the moment it seems kind of hard to find a category page for all OCA: namespace articles -- you can't just search for "OCA" or "OCA:" (right?)

If we want to be really brave, we could make the isotropic NT category something like "Iso-NT". If that caught on -- big "if" -- then there would finally be a short standard way to say "isotropic non-totalistic". Maybe someday people could just say "isont" or "anisont" and expect to be understood. ("Aniso-NT" would be the equivalent category for "anisotropic non-totalistic", but there doesn't seem to be any point in creating that category since nobody's come up with a rule worth naming in that rulespace yet.)

... If anyone does have an objection, please suggest something we could do instead! Dvgrn (talk) 16:40, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

This is probably a bit late, but I think those bunch of edits are a good idea (Which it appears you have not done yet). And yes, I do agree with defining "Life-like" as strictly for Outer-totalistic rules. Nope, you can't just search "OCA" or "OCA:", so yeah, it's currently impossible to find a category with all the OCA rules and nothing more: The "Life-like_cellular_automata" category doesn't include LTL and multistate rules, while the "Cellular_automata" category also lists a bunch of non-rule pages such as the general articles for rulespaces and the lists of rules investigated on Catagolue (which, aren't they obsolete?).
Back on the definition of "Life-like", the inclusion of IsNT (Isotropic Non Totalistic) rules in the category of Life-like CA on the wiki will probably make new CA-Enthusiasts think that they are included in Life-like CA, which might have an effect on the forum.
Also, over on the Discord the standard way to write "Isotropic Non-Totalistic" quicker seems to be "INT", and Heavpoot suggested (somewhat jokingly?) "AINT" for "AnIsotropic Non-Totalistic" (Perhaps "AiNT" is better), or we could just refer to them as "MAP Rules", although yeah, that isn't very good, as MAP includes Isotropic and totalistic rules as well. Saka (talk) 14:04, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Not only Discord uses this name - "INT" is also well known on the forums. Ultimium (talk) 22:00, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Expanding Covered OCA Rules

Does anyone think that having articles for rules beyond Life-Like and Isotropic Non-totalistic should be on here, like Wireworld or Langton's Ant? These would still go under the OCA namespace, obviously. If anyone has any thoughts on this, that would be great. AforAmpere (talk) 5:02, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

As far as I'm concerned, articles for any reasonably well-known rule would be very welcome in the OCA namespace. Wireworld and Langton's Ant definitely count as good examples.
A big reason for inventing the OCA namespace was to provide a place for this kind of information, without accidentally cluttering up the "Life" part of the LifeWiki. Dvgrn (talk) 14:08, 19 April 2020 (UTC)
I would like to contribute to these pages. Ultimium (talk) 02:00, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Mmm, a similar discussion took place three years ago, see LifeWiki:Tiki bar/Archive/2017#Lists_of_rules. Speaking of articles for other cellular automata, how about those red links in the list of Generations rules? There are a variety of rules, and therefore it will be a huge amount of work if we want to write a page for each. Or should we consider their historical/current significance first? Need Generations experts here. (I dislike red links...Wait, I shouldn't show personal feelings here.) GUYTU6J (talk) 16:50, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Personal feelings? Nah, that's just on the actual article pages. I really like red links, because they encourage other people to do documentation work... It would make sense to me to add a page for each of the major Generations rules in the old MCell 4.20 collection, just for starters. There's usually some descriptive text that could be lifted out of Mirek's representative {RULENAME}.mcl file, as a starting point.
The named Generations rules in the MCell pattern collection are Banners, Bombers, Brain 6, Brian's Brain, Burst, BurstII, Caterpillars, Chenille, Ebb&Flow, Ebb&FlowII, Faders, Fireworks, Frogs, Glisserati, Nova, Rake, SediMental, Snake, Spirals, StarWars, Sticks, Swirl, Transers, TransersII, Wanderers, and Worms. There's also an "Other Rules" folder, but it has just a couple of patterns in it -- one in the Star Wars family, and an unnamed explosive one (345/24/25) with a side-effect production of some Rule-90-ish behavior. Dvgrn (talk) 15:08, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Right, I've made attempts to write for Star Wars. It still needs some content about various constructions before releasing to the OCA namespace, but I lack time now. (EDIT: I've released it on June 22, further compositions welcome!) GUYTU6J (talk) 03:21, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

By the way, putting a somewhat off-topic request here: can we integrate a LifeViewer equipped with command RANDOMIZE in Template:Rule? The command is for generating a random 64×64 soup upon launching the viewer (or refreshing the page):

x = 0, y = 0, rule = B3/S23 ! #C [[ THUMBSIZE 2 THEME 6 GRID GRIDMAJOR 0 SUPPRESS THUMBLAUNCH ]] #C [[ RANDOMIZE THUMBLAUNCH OFF THUMBNAIL THUMBSIZE 2 ]]
An example soup in rule B3/S23
(click above to open LifeViewer)

It works well with 2-state rules. For rules with more states, like Generations, more commands is needed to specify which state to use. GUYTU6J (talk) 06:05, 22 June 2020 (UTC)

Criteria for notable INT rules

The discussion at LifeWiki:Tiki bar/Archive/2019#Non-notable isotropic rules inspired me to move OCA:Wlife to User:Evin/Wlife. Previously the reason for proposed deletion was "non-notable rule; forum thread only has 9 posts in total". Sounds reasonable, right?

But then here come the questions. Can we develop some universal criteria for a section in LifeWiki:Notability about an INT rule? Which rule warrants an article on OCA namespace, and which rule is at most qualified for a User subpage? Rules differ greatly in behaviour and potential for interesting technology, but still I think "Well-explored syntheses", "Turing-complete", "Orthogonoid/Demonoid engineered explicitly", or something along these lines, may suffice for the judgement.

Related, should we encourage users to write about their custom INT rule in their User subpage first, and move it to the official OCA namespace after reaching a consensus that it is well-developed and notable enough according to some guideline? GUYTU6J (talk) 02:52, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

I don't think that a rule has to be Turing-complete and have a Orthogonoid/demonoid to be interesting / to warrant their own wiki page, but that's just my opinion. Making a universal definition for interesting INT rules will be hard, as is making a strict definition of interesting anything. But if we do make one, maybe we could judge the rule by it's activity as well? Number of active explorers, number of (useful / constructive) posts in the rule's thread (that are related to the rule, not off-topic chatting), that kind of stuff. One problem I can see with that approach, however, is that some genuinely interesting rules do get unnoticed, but maybe that's outside the scope of this... discussion?
On the last part, yeah, I think that's a good idea. Related to that, is the wiki O.K.a.y. with a bunch of pages under the userspace? We already have a good amount, and if we encourage that we'll have some more. Also, maybe encourage users to write a page under their username if they think their rule is interesting enough (Maybe that will slightly decrease the number of user subpages?).
I don't think we should have strict guidelines but rather a board / panel of people that will decide if a rule warrants a wiki page.
EDIT: I forgot, I do think that the current Wlife page is a bit too empty to be in the official™ OCA namespace. Saka (talk) 04:55, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
Well, the activity of a rule is indeed another possible consideration, though more subjective. Besides quantity, explorers and posts are also of different quality, which is more related to the rule's known interestingness. Also time is an important factor here, as understandings usually cumulate over time. (Of course, given infinite time and adequate utilities, genuinely interesting rules are bound to be realized and explored in-depth, eventually warranting an OCA article.)
Pages under User namespace are not offical, they cannot be found in the simple search on the main page unless you add "User:". They record semi-interesting stuff with potential to be officially notable. For notable rules this can be a primary filter. But wait, what if someone wants to contribute to a rule under someone else's user space?
If the secondary filter for notable rules were to be a group of people, there could sometimes be conflicts of intererst and other complex issues. GUYTU6J (talk) 07:50, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
Sorry for non-constructive comments, but well-developed syntheses seems like a personal bias rather than an actual factor of rules' interestingness. Others seems good enough to me. Ultimium (talk) 11:01, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

2-state rule cleanup

Yet another discussion on the non-Life part of the wiki... I noticed that User:Ian07 deleted a few pages (Tq6, Movingstrings and Lotsofdots) under Rule namespace on Feb 15 due to "2-state rule, no ruletable needed".

At the time of writing there are 73 pages with 2-state range-1 rules on a 2-dimensional square grid. Since they can all be described with MAP strings, I suggest discarding these pages like the previous examples. We need to do the following:

  1. Look into the rule tables and figure out their MAP strings,
  2. Submit the rule names as aliases of the MAP strings, or edit the (if) very few instances mentioning the manes names on the forums.

Does anyone want to help? GUYTU6J (talk) 15:47, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Here are a couple of initial contributions:
1) For a few of these rules, the thing that makes them rule-table-worthy might be not the rule but the associated icons. HexLife and Pentagonhood are examples, I think.
2) I think that the "figure out the MAP strings" part can be done fairly simply with a version of this MAPper Lua script, by installing each rule in Golly, running the script, and copying out the reported MAP string.
Thanks for working on this! Rule namespace maintenance is a big job for one person, but hopefully many hands can help lighten the work. Dvgrn (talk) 18:48, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
Once the aliases are submitted LifeViewer will prefer them to any Rule namespace definition. Regarding Icons: at some stage I'll add support for Icons but it won't be any time soon. For Hex neighbourhood rules there is a MAP format that supports these and will cause LifeViewer to use hexagonal cell display. There's also a VN MAP format but visually it uses square cells like Moore. Help->Info->Pattern will let you know whether LifeViewer is using a Rule namespace definition (there will be a Type of @TABLE or @TREE if so). Chris Rowett (talk) 03:52, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Good. Besides a spelling fix, I have a few minor questions:
Is there a page which lists those aliases, so that one can search (with Ctrl+F) through/copy them?
The rule tables were added to LifeWiki in an "auto-import project". Where can I see the details of the project? Can it be modified so that 2-state rules are not collected?
Do we need to archive the references on the rule pages? GUYTU6J (talk) 06:47, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
You can see the list of aliases in LifeViewer with Help->Aliases. While the Help is displayed pressing Ctrl-C copies the topic to the clipboard.
For the auto-import project Dvgrn wrote the script to scan the forums and find the rules. I then used the output from this to create the required rule definitions (adding @TREE sections where missing) which he then uploaded to the Rule namespace. Built-in rules (like B3/S23 etc) and existing LifeViewer aliases were filtered out. Chris Rowett (talk) 09:11, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
Re: auto-import scripts --
That project was a one-time effort, and nobody is currently planning on ever running those scripts again. They were a combination of one-off Python scraper scripts and some Selenium automation trickery. From now on, as new rules get created, there will be a strong incentive for anyone posting new-rule patterns to the forums, to just throw a copy immediately into the Rule namespace, so that LifeViewer can display those patterns. So -- at least according to my theory -- there's no need to run any further automated surveys to try to pick up new rules posted on the forums. We'd get a lot of duplication and possible conflict headaches, for no obvious benefit.
A survey that could be done is to run back through old posts and look for old-style rule tables. There are a few of those that were missed because they don't have the @TABLE keyword at the top of the code block. But I think most of the commonly used rules have long since been converted to @TABLE format, so this would just pick up a few out-of-fashion rules from the early 2010s.
The auto-import script that _is_ run semi-regularly, every month or two, is the one that takes new embedded and infobox patterns from the RLE namespace and turns them into commented patterns added to the all.zip LifeWiki pattern collection. Dvgrn (talk) 15:29, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
Alright, I'm done. Here's the list of aliases I created:
  • Bigship - B2ei3eiqry4ny5ajkr/S23ajkr4jnry5inq
  • WolfVN-W50_B14_S34V - B2an3cjr4acij5nqy6ak/S2cn3cqy4cny5e
  • B2ex3-lS23 - B2en3-a/S23
  • randomnn - MAPA1Az8wMAqgAAUADAAAAAAAAAgMAAAIAAgICAwAAAgAAAAAAAiACqAAAAAAAAAAAAAACAAIgAgACAgIAAAACAAA
  • water - MAPABAbrwAA//8AQltdAAD+/8Aa/f8AAP//YgD//wAA//8AAP//QAD//wBA//8AAP/fAgD3+wKA//8AIPZ/AAD//w
  • B45_S034_N21 - B2ei3-ce4cny/S02-cn3cinqy4c
  • HexLife (Saka) - B3o/S234-o6
  • rules6 - MAPAgl/+0Ug/fVAIv/9AADdPwDi9/uAQft5qIDtlQgA/b8gAP//AAD//wAQv/8AAP7+AhD/+gAA/f8EAv//AID//w
  • x-rule - MAPBSB64CCTqARFBImEADAGBSCTgICTSIAAADCFCSTAAAANAMEUBCKEBchCE00YAE3IACSFACCIQQDIIF4UIIAGSA
  • pentagonhood - MAPEWYRZmaIZogRZhFmZohmiGaIZoiIAIgAZohmiIgAiAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAB
  • B578_S4567_N31 - B3-ce4aikqtwz5e/S2-cn3-ce4cny5e
Notes:
  • B45_S034_N21 was anisotropic as a .rule file, but intended to be isotropic.
  • The original name of HexLife (Saka) was just HexLife.
  • B578_S4567_N31 simply did not work as intended. The inferred rule preserves everything described except the r-pentomino, which should just be an error in the original. I don't know.
I'd say HexLife (Saka) and pentagonhood should stay where they are due to their @ICONS sections and everything else could be cleaned up.
Also hey, did you know you can customise your signature? bubblegum-talk|contribs 00:33, 29 July 2020 (UTC)

Topics article suggestion

Some thread-digging found a post listing the topics in Game of Life. Anyone putting it on the LifeWiki? I have little time on this. GUYTU6J (talk) 06:10, 18 June 2020 (UTC)

It would be really interesting to try to come up with a list of all of the esoteric sub-fields of Conway's Life that have been studied over the last five decades, including whatever links and references are available for each topic. OCA topics should have their own list, no doubt, for stuff like record-breaking RROs, Spaceships Made of Spaceships, the 5S project, micro-Orthogonoids, etc., etc.
Let's see, here's one more list for Conway's Life to be integrated. Also two more lists of topics have now been cleaned up a bit and dropped in User:Dvgrn/Life_Topics. Dvgrn (talk) 20:21, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
That's a wonderful toplevel design! Actually the list in my quote was adapted from that in yours. By"LLLS" in volume VII it means LSSS, right? Also, where would Project von Neumann and existing tutorials on LifeWiki go in this scheme? GUYTU6J (talk) 03:44, 19 June 2020 (UTC)
Ha, yes, LLLS is a typo, now fixed. Project von Neumann hasn't progressed far enough yet to deserve a place on the list, probably. Maybe give it a few more years. I at least won't be spending time on it until the Life textbook is all wrapped up and out the door.
Good suggestion on the tutorials. I've gone through the outline and added a few items, and added links to tutorials when they're available. Will try to go back and annotate everything else that's mentioned in the outline, a volume at a time... might take a while.

Except for "Volume 1", which will actually become a generally-available PDF sometime in 2021, I suppose the outline is kind of heavy on specific patterns and light on general theory. Maybe the "list of topics" should really be an article, separate from my "outline of explanations of large constructions" (which probably doesn't rate an article). As I add more "volumes", I guess some of the later ones get more into covering higher-level topics, but it's probably a confusing way to organize things for a general audience. Dvgrn (talk) 12:40, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Embedded-viewer variant collections

I just tried some experiments with using embedded viewers floating to left, right and center, in the Fx77 article.

It looks like it's always going to be a little tricky to get this kind of viewer stamp collection to flow correctly on the page, cooperating with the infobox -- at least, unless someone can put together some very very clever templates. It seems to be far beyond my web layout skills.

I found that the old trick of adding 

<div style="clear:both;"> ... </div>

almost worked well for flow control -- for example, to force the centered Fx77+R64 to drop below the two Hersrch Fx77 variants, Fx77S and Fx77SW. This looks okay on a small laptop screen, but produces ridiculous amounts of whitespace on a larger monitor, so I removed it. The clear:both trick is particularly unwieldy when a pattern has a very lengthy infobox, because all the following text drops below the entire infobox -- not just below the most recent embedded viewers.

Also, it seems as if I often get stuck having just one left-aligned, one right-aligned, and one center-aligned embedded-viewer thumbnail. I'm thinking that there are a number of medium-sized stamp collections that it would be good to get into LifeWiki articles, e.g., maybe representatives of the sixteen classes of glider timing adjustment circuits. I've never gotten a midsized collection like that to look any good on multiple monitors, but maybe if they all just float left with THUMBNAIL THUMBSIZE 3 in LifeViewer, that will be about the best we can do?

I did find that captions could be improved by centering with 

<div style="text-align:center;">first-line caption<br /><br />extended-caption<br /><br /></div>

Does that look tolerable to everyone else? Unless this is added, EmbedViewers with position=center will have centered caption text, but position=left and position=right EmbedViewer captions will both have left-justified text, which doesn't look so good. The automatically-added last two lines still end up left-justified in those two cases, unfortunately; I didn't attempt to fix that for the Fx77 article.

In general, if anyone has better suggestions for dealing with page flow issues like these, please let me know! Dvgrn (talk) 15:51, 1 July 2020 (UTC)

Link to Discord server on navbar?

So today ApChrKey joined and said something about how the invite link was really hard to find. It is on links but at the very bottom. (I don't know how that affects it but whatever) Macbi suggested that we could put it up top on the navbar or whatever it's called. Given that we already have a way to cite it I don't see why we can't have a direct way to access it. Bubblegum (talk) 22:56, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

I know my opinion on the Discord server is considered worthless by many, and I don't even partipicate much here. But I'd personally prefer the Discord server to not appear on the obvious places due to several reasons:

1. The reputation of the Discord server is currently disputed (or was it just my point of view?) and it have a very low signal-to-noise ratio. This might - I said *might* - leave a bad impression on people who visit this site.

(Well, that's under the assumption that we want few high-quality new users rather than lots of low-quality new users. I spent like 1/12 of my life working toward the former situation, but I understand objections.)

2. More people will probably make the signal-to-noise ratio worse especially considering most new users quit after finding LWSSes or settle on easy rules low-quality contributions.

My personal opinions above. I try to be more neutral so that my opinions be more valuable than "Seriously? This community is already a mess - let's not make it any messier.". Ultimium (talk) 05:25, 20 May 2021 (UTC)

Time to delete Template:LinkWeisstein?

At this point, I think it's unlikely that the site is going to be updated so that this template can be re-enabled. As it stands, all this template does is produce an ugly piece of whitespace in articles such as toad. Any objections to deleting it? (note that I can semi-automatically remove all the occurrences beforehand with AutoWikiBrowser) Ian07 (talk) 16:40, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

I don't see anyone posting any objections. Certainly I don't object. I've been writing to Eric Weisstein every few years, asking for him to get those out-of-date pages either updated or removed, but have never gotten a response back. Or not about that, anyway -- there was one short email exchange just after I attended a Wolfram CA summer session, once upon a time. Dvgrn (talk) 23:53, 2 December 2020 (UTC)
I wasn't anticipating any objections either, but I just wanted to be safe. Since it's now evident that someone else has tried and failed to resolve the issue, I've gone ahead and deleted the template along with its transclusions. Thanks to AWB, this was a mercifully quick process: only 13 minutes to go through ~250 articles. Ian07 (talk) 01:52, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

A minor issue concerning the deleted template: as said on Special:WantedPages, other external link templates still have a link to the LinkWeisstein template, presumably due to Template:ListOfLinkTemplates. I don't see where to fix that. GUYTU6J (talk) 06:55, 7 December 2020 (UTC)

Excessive barberpole articles

In light of the recent merging of Template:Vessel articles, we should probably consider merging some of the larger barberpoles as well, as most people seem to agree that going up to quindecapole is pretty excessive. However, this raises the question of what the new cutoff point should be. I'd say we should keep at least everything up to heptapole, since all of those have shown up naturally. Note that although duodecapole does not have any sample soups in any symmetry, tredecapole does, making that the largest semi-natural barberpole. Ian07 (talk) 14:11, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Agreed. I think it would be nice to link barberpole from the individual barberpole pages. Also, just in case even the natural ones gets too many, a "Further Plan B" could be merging the "natural-but-no-content-otherwise-barberpoles" inside barberpole or something similar. (Edit: a table would be nice and clean)
Scorbie (talk) 01:48, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
Everything between pentapole and quindecapole has now been merged into the new table at Barberpole, thanks to User:Book. I know I said that heptapole should be kept, but honestly I've changed my mind on that since even the pentapole doesn't really have much to be said about it other than it first appearing on Catagolue, so it can essentially just be put into the table without losing a significant amount of info. Even volatility, which very few people seem to care about nowadays, can be boiled down to a simple equation. So I've gone ahead and been bold by redirecting everything above n=4 to the main barberpole article. If anyone disagrees, feel free to do the other two things. Ian07 (talk) 01:32, 16 November 2021 (UTC)
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