ConwayLife.com

I'm fascinated by cellular automata in general and GOL in particular. I have a lot of questions I haven't been able to find the answers to, and the more I learn the more questions I have. I'm looking for a GOL expert I can ask questions to by skype or phone or email, probably about 2 hours a month on an ongoing basis. If this is something you might be interested in, please email me to let me know what your hourly rate would be and any other relevant details. My email address is thomasmurcko (at) gmail. Thanks! - Tom

What sorts of questions? Depending on the question, we might be able to answer it here, as we have several Life experts in different fields here on the forum.

On a different perspective, I'm about to start a new blog in blogger about CGoL for newcomers. I would like to get some advice and possibly help in areas I am not familiar with (like glider synthesis, universal construction, pattern assembly etc.) Yeah, there is math.com but there is quite a big gap between that and current studies. Just vaguely thought about it yesterday so I'm not sure whether it will be presented soon.

EDIT: Any suggestions with blog name and contents? First thought CGoL for dummies, but that seems to be a registered trademark symbol and I'm not that bright in these kind of issues.

Scorbie wrote:EDIT: Any suggestions with blog name and contents? First thought CGoL for dummies, but that seems to be a registered trademark symbol and I'm not that bright in these kind of issues.

Well, what kind of name would you like? There are lots of bad puns available: GoL Seeking, Eyes On The GoL, The Meaning of Life, The Best Things in (Conway's) Life, etc., etc.

Or maybe say exactly what you're trying to do with the blog: Conway's Life Explained in a Surprisingly Large Number of Small Easy Steps...

As for contents: it does seem as if there's a lot of interesting stuff to be explained, as soon as you get beyond the real basics (yeah, I do like that math.com intro). There are a surprising number of separate little areas of expertise in the Game, often almost completely separate from each other, so that an expert in one subfield may still need a basic introduction in another subfield.

For example, there are people who have what I consider to be a magical ability to build things by crashing gliders together, or to patch together spaceships or high-period rakes out of an incomprehensible "grammar" of complex delicately-balanced parts. Many of them say that they wouldn't know where to start if it came to putting together a Herschel-based logic circuit. [But really maybe they're just not interested; Herschel tracks are definitely among the strangest and awkwardest and least elegant ways of doing computations that can be imagined.]

First, for real beginners there's the (relatively) simple definition stuff: what's lightspeed, what's a rake, what's a puffer, what's a methuselah, what's a catalyst, and what makes all of these things interesting?

A step or two beyond that, here's a list off the top of my head that's no doubt missing all sorts of interesting topics:

Glider synthesis
Construction with stationary guns
Construction with rakes
Slide guns and tethered rakes
P30/P46 logic circuitry
Stable circuitry
Glider gun optimization
Welding still lifes
Glider color and phase, relating to reflections
Oscillator rotors and stators
Grayships
Spaceship types
Cordership combinations
Generalized caterpillar construction
"Spaceships"/signals that travel in wires and agars
Universal constructors
Construction with slow salvos (p2, monochromatic, mod N, etc.)
One-time reflectors and multi-glider "seeds"
Sparse Life and the fate of the "early universe"
Minimal infinite-growth patterns
Unusual population/bounding-box growth rates
Novelty-generating feedback loops
Golly Hashlife uses and limitations
Golly scripting
Reaction mining
de Bruijn graphs
SAT solvers
Search software -- separate explanations needed for each:

• Bellman
• lifesrc/WLS/JLS
• gencols
• catalyst/catgl
• ptbsearch
• Hersrch
  etc.

Is any of that helpful at all, or am I off on the wrong track entirely?

dvgrn wrote:Is any of that helpful at all, or am I off on the wrong track entirely?

Wow, that list is a really comprehensive overview of the realms in Life. Yeah, I intended to do something like that... but realized that I don't even fully understand a quarter of modern Life. Wow....

Scorbie wrote:Yeah, I intended to do something like that... but realized that I don't even fully understand a quarter of modern Life.

Not to worry -- nobody does, really. Topics tend to get bigger and more complex the more people work on them, and a lot of people have concentrated on one specialty area or another. Some of these items have been studied fairly intensively, at least off and on, for forty-five years now -- the amount of detail that has piled up is really quite amazing.

Those forty-five years cause problems in other more subtle ways, too. For example, most of the search utilities in that list are command-line utilities, no front end provided. They were mostly written when computers were slower than what's generally available today by a factor of a hundred or a thousand or more, so it was important to be as efficient as possible, and not so important to be user-friendly.

[Come to think of it, any user-friendly interface that had worked in the 1990's wouldn't be working very well by this time, anyway -- cf. lifesrc, WinLifeSearch, and now JavaLifeSearch.]

The effect is that people who got used to doing Life research in the 1990s developed a somewhat opaque set of methods and tools and information, which work just fine for them, but might be hard for newcomers to get used to. All the more reason for writing some good introductions to different topics.

-- One topic at a time is plenty, though, I'd say; no need to get overwhelmed trying to figure it all out at once. There are certainly plenty of topics on the above that I carefully ignore, just to keep my brain in more-or-less working order...!

Dude, I would totally be willing to help! e-mail me at any time if you got any questions or tutorial requests. My e-mail is 21andersonm@smtexas.org!

dvgrn wrote: Not to worry -- nobody does, really. Topics tend to get bigger and more complex the more people work on them, and a lot of people have concentrated on one specialty area or another.

The specialization is a bit like medicine. I wouldn't consult a podiatrist for a sore throat. However, EVERY doctor begins with anatomy. A significant overlap between the various disciplines exists in GoL too.
The links post in the General Discussion thread leads to much of the earliest archived study in various pattern collections, and is IMHO a worthy starting point in GoL 'anatomy'. I regularly consult and have found many gems in these archives.

triller

@dvgrn how about infinite growth? Nick Gotts for example considered to be expert in this particular field.

Some people also don't have "specialization" but they contribute by improving existing patterns with very impressive adjustments like Chris Cain.

After what I've seen, chris_c is my favorite specialist at least in 2-dimensional modulo arithmetics in a moving reference frame Though this field of study may seem quite abstract, it has immediate practical implications:)

codeholic wrote:After what I've seen, chris_c is my favorite specialist at least in 2-dimensional modulo arithmetics in a moving reference frame

I think some kind of tiebreaker race may be necessary before I can pick a favorite, after biggiemac's appearance on the scene. Seems like some serious specialization in that exact field was required, to construct an entire (23,5)c/79 knightship almost unaided.

After these last two comments, I added a few more items to the above list:

Construction with slow salvos (p2, monochromatic, mod N, etc.)
Sparse Life and the fate of the "early universe"
Minimal infinite-growth patterns
Unusual population/bounding-box growth rates
Novelty-generating feedback loops

I could also add specialized golly scripts to build array of constructions - like the glider gun script, which require not only "construction novelty" but also the ability to generate "array" of useful constructions using script (there is no point to build single p8348724224 glider gun).

And many other combinations: like massive glider gun construction, that requires a bit of universal construction knowledge, and a bit of scripting, and working with "big data".

Also chris_c and dvgrn found lately the smallest sawtooth - just by some pure "trickery" which is not a field, but some sort of "magic reaction mining". My first 25 and 24 quadratics were as well built on pure trickery.

I would say there should be some field called "reaction mining". Calcyman's soup search is probably one of the most known and useful reaction mining scripts. Another example is the *WSS edge shooters scripts that were built lately, they all part of this field.

I definitely think that 'generalised caterpillar construction' should be added to that list, to include the recent developments of 17c/45, 31c/240, (23,5)c/79 and (3,6)c/P spaceships.

The other 'trending' pursuit nowadays seems to be glider syntheses. I feel that Mark Niemiec and Martin Grant are essentially the Hardy and Ramanujan, respectively, in this field. I've always been terribly useless at producing glider syntheses, though, so perhaps I'm not qualified to make this judgement.

I'm not sure what my specialism is now, if it even exists. I was originally one of the Herschel-based circuit designers, then had a foray in self-replication (mainly in other cellular automata), and now I seem to have semi-retired from GoL with my only recent contributions being apgsearch and Catagolue. As such, I'm really grateful that people are actually finding this software useful and investing vast swathes of CPU time into this project.

calcyman wrote:I'm not sure what my specialism is now, if it even exists.

I fell a lot of us, particularly those less-skilled (not including you obviously), are in this same "misc" bin. I was helping with glider synthesis for a while, but now I'm throwing Bellman at the wall until Herschel conduits come out, and apgsearching B34/S26 on the side...you can explore Life in lots of ways, and well, we do.