otismo wrote: December 23rd, 2021, 1:54 am
My clunky eater will work for over 48,000 generations before it blows up...
It would work forever if you did a little bit of analysis about the period of the drive gun at the left that's shooting the seven signals. There's nothing magical about that period -- it was just "big enough for the signals, plus a little more", and the signals aren't evenly spaced.
So if you adjust the spacing of the signals in the drive gun so that the weekenders and doo-dahs
are evenly spaced, then it looks like you'll only need a single set of blinker-making guns, not multiple sets plus a terminal eater, doing mysterious things and sometimes canceling themselves out.
otismo wrote: December 23rd, 2021, 1:54 amNext I will try shooting the tail off the doodah if I can figure out how to make the right period gun...
The nice thing about the
doo-dah-removing glider is that if it's just a weekender going by, the glider doesn't interfere. So fixing the drive-gun period will also solve that problem quite nicely.
Anyway, nice work! Getting in and experimenting with stuff is most of the battle. Technically I'd say these things aren't quite eaters as they stand, because they depend too much on the period of the input -- they're more like "suppressors" or something. A true weekender|doo-dah eater is definitely possible (and it's probably easier than a [weekender|doo-dah]-to-glider(s) converter), but you'll need to find some kind of bait that produces an output when it's hit, rather than just mutually annihilating whatever comes in.
Preferably the bait objects will produce a different output depending on whether it's a weekender or doo-dah that comes in -- also possible, but it might be a bit trickier to find.
