On Mon, Oct 29, 2018 at 6:54 PM Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> wrote:
I urge anyone who has not tried this to randomly delete one of the 1142 gliders and watch things shut completely down. Nice exercise: Use Golly to determine that 1142 glider count. (Ask for hints!) —Bill
Partial SPOILER: Rohan came close: Run it 100 and xor the original, poofing the centinals. Now we should have just the gliders and MWSSs, double exposed. How do we punt the MWSSs? Rohan hoped just running them until they were easily segregated. Or dumping the MWSS beams into eight eaters. Boy did that fail. Particularly along the "equator", whose crossing requires centinals. But there was a more immediate bug: The xor indeed produced gliders and spaceships, but also blobs where gliders were combining into spaceships, and gliders were forming in the "amplifier stages". Workaround: xor generations 192 and 292 instead of 0 and 100. *Now* how to subtract the MWSSs? Even if you're uninterested in Life, check out Scripts>Lua>oplus>slide-show.lua . E.g., there's a CA that fully factors integers! Neither Rohan's von Neumann replicator (500fold speedup) nor any one-ups is there yet, but see http://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3439&p=61212#p61421 —rwg Perhaps in the info the .lua could encourage these experiments. It might
also mention that this was only the 3rd(?) "glider" gun, following a 10(?) yr drought. (The technology supports periods 900+200n, but n=0 gives a dull multiple of 30.) And I would like to hear about the CAD technology, which seems dramatically more concise than my ZetaLisp CAD system.