b-engine wrote: March 10th, 2024, 12:10 am
Also, now the patterns in my previous post can function normally.
The sqrt-growth pattern certainly works now, as confocaloid demonstrated.
That and the other three patterns aren't really workable candidates for Golly's pattern collection yet. I've explained some of the reasons for that; I can try giving another summary in case that's helpful.
Patterns pretty much never get checked in to Golly when they're designed to run in rules that have been changing a lot very recently, especially when those rules seem quite likely to continue to get updated. There are patterns in the B-Univ thread running in at least a dozen different versions of B-Univ. To an outside observer, the rule development seems to be in a fairly confusing state at the moment. Maybe it will have settled down enough, and enough unique and interesting patterns will have been created using it, by the time the next Golly release comes around.
1) The sqrt-growth pattern links to a post that mentions that B-Univ now has "support for
universal regulator". How exactly could a universal regulator be built in B-Univ? That post doesn't say, and the two patterns in that linked post are running in different rules.
2) the "W110 simulator in B-Univ" comments contain no explanation of how that loop simulates W110. What is the size of the simulated W110 universe? Why is it all folded up with no viewable readout of the current meta-generation? What is the period of one meta-generation? Your "
signal splitter and magnifier" answers some of these questions but not all of them -- and if this pattern were going to get added to Golly, it would need to stand alone and be self-explanatory.
3) The "B-Univ universal constructor demo" pattern doesn't demonstrate universal construction all that well. There's nothing in the comments that say which cell states on the tape will cause a construction arm to turn left or turn right or lay down a new wire cell -- and there are no links to an explanation. If someone does some digging, they might figure out that those details are
probably the same as the ones in the "B-UnivUpdate5" rule from the sqrt-growth pattern post, but none of that is very clear.
What the demo pattern actually does is thoroughly mysterious. No goals are stated in the comments besides that the pattern is a universal-constructor demo. It seems to randomly build a disconnected unused domino of wire, then builds a small loop, and then re-fills the original wire from the opposite direction, with the output of a low-period gun created in that loop.
Why would that last part be a useful thing to do? For universal construction, a good demo would be more likely to shut down cleanly after accomplishing a clearly defined task. Maybe the task here is "build a sample short length of wire and then a small loop gun", but that's not clear from the pattern's comments.
4) The 7-segment display is really just a Bliptile demo pattern, functionally unchanged. Without some justification for the extra states added to the existing "Bliptile" rule to turn it into "B-Univ", the simpler rule might actually be preferable. A lot of CA patterns are showcases of how really complex and interesting things can be done with rules that are kept as simple as possible.
I understand that you're adding universal construction to Bliptile, but it just doesn't look like the development of B-Univ is anywhere near done yet. Until development is done, there's definitely no reason to be in a hurry about adding B-Univ patterns to Golly's pattern collection.
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The
B-Univ spaceship you've built is actually a much better demo of universal construction. The pattern is accomplishing a clear goal. It would be good if there was some explanation of how it accomplishes that goal, though -- like,
The top loop shortens the bottom two loops on the left
The second loop from the top lengthens the bottom two loops on the right
The third loop from the top lengthens the top two loops on the right
The bottom loop shortens the top two loops on the left
Without at least that kind of level of detail in the comments, or in a Web page somewhere that the comments link to, patterns don't generally end up getting added to Golly's base pattern collection. The pattern comments really need to clearly answer any obvious questions about the pattern, and give a clear place that an interested reader can go to get more information.
As a side note, it should be possible to adjust that spaceship to a period quite a bit lower than 2c/1042.