Where we go ?

[Tawal]

It was only a year ago that I discovered the world of Conway's Game of Life by learning the C language.

The Conway Game of Life is already over 50 years old.
Many discoveries and mathematical theorems have come out of it since then.
There's a plethora of literature on the subject.
I'm far from having read it all, and I'm restricting myself to certain areas.

I'm still surprised that today there are no properly classified collections with the necessary information.
I've already found (they've been pointed out to me) some of them, but they're either not up to date or lack information.
For example, the H-to-Gn collection lacks information such as RT, a classification of edge shooters, transparent lane etc.
But where is the Gx-to-G collection? etc ?

That's why I suggested dedicating threads to each collection (with its own rules) and one thread listing all these collections.
In addition, an official maintainer of the collection would be welcome in my opinion.

I think we now have almost all the data and relationships to judiciously create these collections.
They will be useful for newcomers and experienced users alike.
If someone could create a LifeWiki's page listing all currently known collections, that would be a good start.

So much for generalities, here's my personal feeling:
If I have to glean the various components one by one, if I see the whole forum, wiki, blogs, discord, books ... being searched, I give up.
It's all very well to warn of rediscoveries, but you still need something to compare ...

Edit:
I have the impression that everyone keeps their own collections.
And I do too, but it's a lot of work and they all lack information/cleanliness. If I only had to take care of one or two ...

[confocaloid]

Some earlier discussions:
History Of ConwayLife
About contributions, participation and personal investment in Conway Life (mentioned above)
Research Notes & Organization Practices

Also, aside from technical lessons, a "social" lesson. A sufficiently motivated hobbyist community can move far in advance of universities and industry. The explicit examples of self-replication in Life and the novel patterns found through search have no parallel in peer-reviewed literature. I'm not exactly sure why this is. And in fact, when academic research does make a reference to Conway's Game of Life, it usually lacks the depth of understanding of this community.

This is not really the work of amateurs. Many have a "day job" involving more conventional research, and know more about CGOL than ostensible experts in cellular automata. Maybe it's the inability to pigeonhole it into a research field (so no university interest) and no way to monetize it (so no industry interest). I suspect that there are some learnings that will be useful to keep in mind when we start to build real-life self-replicating machines (whether nanotechnology or some other approach). I'm not alone in the frustration that this "hobby" has produced very sophisticated work by experts and yet is not taken seriously.

[...]
With the current hobbyist level of effort I still won't be surprised if such a self-replicator someday gets built. We know how such a thing could be built in principle, and it takes a lot of time and effort to actually build such a thing with current technology, but I don't think it's more than what a single person can do working continuously on it for ten years.

Anyways, I hope you guys are not too annoyed by all my dreaming and high expectations while everyone else is doing all the real work. I'll add a more constructive remark: The way these designs work is that the displacement between gliders encodes in binary the design of a pattern. How much quicker would a reaction to make a particular pattern be if there were more gliders than the minimum necessary? [...]

[confocaloid]

[...]
For example, the H-to-Gn collection lacks information such as RT, a classification of edge shooters, transparent lane etc.
But where is the Gx-to-G collection? etc ?
[...] If I only had to take care of one or two ...

I think it would make sense to keep multiple smaller collections, each including reactions or components of a specific well-defined type. Currently there are some unnecessarily large collections, where components of different types are put together into one stamp collection RLE. Some properties only make sense for a subset of components. Different types of reactions would need different approaches.

Another issue is that often it would be useful to be able to "filter" or "sort" the collection by some criteria. For example, I might want to look at all known Spartan H-to-G converters where the output glider's colour matches the colour of the first natural glider of the input Herschel. That's two separate requirements.

It was only a year ago that I discovered the world of Conway's Game of Life by learning the C language.

The Conway Game of Life is already over 50 years old.
Many discoveries and mathematical theorems have come out of it since then.
There's a plethora of literature on the subject.
I'm far from having read it all, and I'm restricting myself to certain areas.

I'm still surprised that today there are no properly classified collections with the necessary information. [...]

Compiling collections and keeping them updated takes efforts. Indeed, people keep their own collections of reactions/components, when they know they will need those components easily available.

Unfortunately, there might be a gradual shift here, away from previously understood DIY-and-share culture, and towards a situation where some things that usually make people less enthusiastic are now happening more often than several years ago. People explore Life/CA primarily because of curiosity, and people do things when they see and understand what and why needs to be done, rather than because they're told by someone else.

after all, Conway's game of life has existed for more than a decade.

Over five decades, actually. This website is just the latest chapter in its history, which goes back to the late 1960s.