How to run Searching Program?

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kiho park
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How to run Searching Program?

Post by kiho park »

Please some one tell me How to run Pattern searching program.
Can small adjustable spaceships overrun the speed limit of (|x|+|y|)/P = 1?

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dvgrn
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Re: How to run Searching Program?

Post by dvgrn »

kiho park wrote:Please some one tell me How to run Pattern searching program.
That's a difficult question. What kind of patterns do you want to search for? Choose the appropriate program from David Eppstein's list, download it and get it to compile and run, and then ask questions from there.

Some search programs have pre-compiled Windows executable versions posted here and there, as attachments on forum threads for example -- or sometimes there's a separate link; see under "lifesrc" for example.

One big omission on David Eppstein's list is Karel Suhajda's Java version of lifesrc, by the way. JLS 1.7 has the potential to produce interesting new results in a lot of different areas, with the right setup -- new oscillators or useful sparkers, maybe even new glider constructions. Unfortunately the learning curve is fairly steep for getting to "the right setup"... but without specific questions it's hard to explain more.

(I'm not much good with JLS myself, for that matter.)
kiho park
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Joined: September 24th, 2010, 12:16 am

Re: How to run Searching Program?

Post by kiho park »

dvgrn wrote:What kind of patterns do you want to search for?
I want to find Patterns have period more than 2. such as Spaceships, Agar, and Oscilators
Can small adjustable spaceships overrun the speed limit of (|x|+|y|)/P = 1?

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mniemiec
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Re: How to run Searching Program?

Post by mniemiec »

kiho park wrote:
dvgrn wrote:What kind of patterns do you want to search for?
I want to find Patterns have period more than 2. such as Spaceships, Agar, and Oscilators
Different kinds of search programs focus on different areas. It will depend a lot on what kinds of spaceships, agars, and oscillators you want to find, and why you are looking for them.

For example, for my own purposes, I search for still-lifes and low-period oscillators with specific populations, where population is important, but bounding box is not, so I have my own custom search program to do this. Most of the ones I know of allow you to specify a bounding box size.

The search space of small objects (e.g., 20-24 bits) has been well searched, so it's unlikely that anything new and exciting will show up. There are a very large number of derivative objects - for example, larger period 3 versions of cuphooks, candelfrobras, two eaters, trice tongs, etc., larger period 4 molds, larger period 5 pseudo-barber-poles and Silver's P5s, etc., but these are not likely to be very interesting unless you're trying to do something like "list all 25-bit period-4 oscillators" or "find a mold with an eater-like head {right there}" etc. Of course, there are always exceptions, like last year's discovery of the Loafer, which is a small spaceship, of a velocity never yet seen, and easily glider-constructible.

If you're searching for your own education and entertainment, by all means, search anything and everything. If you're trying to expand the "state of the art", however, it's unlikely that you will find anything spectacular soon, unless you are willing to devote a lot of time and energy (not to mention computer horsepower) to the task.
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