erictom333 wrote: March 5th, 2026, 6:46 am
Yes, but as I said, I believe that "Spartan" should refer to the 2006 set and not the more expansive definition that (IMO) defeats the purpose of the name.
Yeah, confocaloid pointed out an aspect of this issue a couple of years ago:
confocaloid wrote: June 24th, 2024, 1:14 pm
In the infoboxes, there is a parameter to specify Spartanness of conduits. There are only two possible values ("yes" and "no"). The parameter is not applied consistently across the wiki. It doesn't convey any clear technical information of the kind that could work well in an infobox.
I suggest to deprecate the infobox parameter, and to hide the line from the display (so it doesn't show even when specified). I think the "degree of constructibility" of patterns can only be correctly clearly explained in plain text outside the infobox.
Previous discussion:
Future of the spartan parameter ...
I was really quite surprised when people started using the term "Spartan" to refer to circuitry that included
things like eater tail eaters, or even Snarks once Snarks could be constructed by slmake. It makes things enormously confusing when someone in let's say 2015 can correctly say that such-and-such pattern is
not Spartan, but then in 2025 someone else can correctly say that the same exact pattern
is Spartan.
But that's the way it goes. Terminology shifts, and one must be flexible and bend with the times.
For me personally, "Spartan" has now become pretty much an unusable term on its own. The meaning can be clear in the context of a specific discussion, like the one about the "
fully Spartan Demonoid". But notice that even there, the prefix "fully" was needed to make the meaning clear -- "Spartan" was no longer enough by itself.
It seems to me it's way too late to put the Spartan cat back into its old terminology bag. Like it or not, there are now way way too many existing uses of "Spartan" that mean something other than "2006 Spartan". And honestly the problem started very early.
Even before slmake came along, we already had some imprecision creeping in -- 2004-Spartan, 2006-Spartan and 2012-Spartan are all different, and it's not clear which of them would allow a long ship, and it's even less clear what to say if you mean "
the kind of Spartan that allows eater2s but not more expensive stuff like Snarks"
For reasonable precision, "neo-Spartan" seems good for "a constellation that,
as of the time of writing, we can just throw into slmake and not worry about whether it will compile". I suppose then "paleo-Spartan" might be the original 2004 definition, probably with ponds included (see, the vagueness started almost instantly.) But there are so many other variants!
I suppose if we really wanted to try to de-confuse the issue, we'd put a table in the
Spartan article and define exactly what "{year}-Spartan" means, for each year when a technological advance happened and the definition of "neo-Spartan" shifted yet again. People might actually find it useful to go pick a "{year}-Spartan" that matched their specific intended meaning, out of a nice clean table. And then it would be much easier to identify what "Spartan" meant in cases like "Spartan Universal Computer-Constructor" where it was part of the official name of something.
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