ConwayLife.com

Helping intuitive understanding is much more important than "documenting existing common usage".

If readers are confused by counterintuitive/vague/ambiguous terminology, then no amount of lexicographic activity will fix that.

edit: The purpose of this topic is to provide a place for various people to discuss

• the current level of "beginner-friendliness" and "reader-friendliness" of this website (including both the forums and the wiki, despite significant differences between posting something on the forums and explaining the same thing in a wiki article)
• existing possibilities for that to be improved, in order to help the beginners and curious readers to understand what is going on, using their intuition from wider fields (math in general; science in general; real life), without asking them to unnecessarily spend lots of time studying local terminologies and quirks and lurking through forum threads.

Relevant for wiki issues, and probably for some forum issues as well: LifeWiki:Style guide

confocaloid wrote: April 28th, 2024, 9:45 am Helping intuitive understanding is much more important than "documenting existing common usage".

I need a triple like button for this.

Part of the reason why I joined the forums is to improve on already-existing terminology, but you have convinced me that the already-existing terminology needs a complete makeover.

I understand that many others disagree with you on this issue, but I am probably one of the only forum users who agree with you.

For others:

Here is the terminology that confocaloid is proposing:

A transition is an ordered pair (current cellstate, new cellstate). There are n^2 possible transitions in a n-state rule.

A condition is a specification of current states of cells in the cell's neighbourhood, under some equivalence class.

A transition rule is a combination of a condition and a transition: simply an ordered tuple (a, b, c), where (a, c) is the transition and b is the condition.

Then a CA is a set of transition rules where for every a, b, there is a unique transition rule with those a, b.

If this is not intuitive, I don't know what is. Even Lifeline uses it (pointed out to me by confocaloid).

Also, these definitions line up with the ordinary English meanings of each word, making it much, much more intuitive.

I agree that we should come up with a new 'green writeup'.

About beginner-friendliness, one can write at the top of some OCA pages something like:

This page assumes knowledge of [[Hensel notation]].

That way people can look up the page for Hensel notation. One can also utilize what the Xenharmonic Wiki does, having separate beginner and advanced/expert pages for some topics.

But this raises a question: what does one mean by 'advanced'? In CA theory? Mathematics? One solution is to assume CA theoreticians might read the advanced pages, and mathematicians could read 'mathematicians' pages' or something like that. These are all just half formed ideas, and I would love to hear others' opinions on these ideas.

Also, because of this argument, my OCA book project will now be discontinued, probably for an infinite time.

There is a difference between someone unintentionally writing in an unclear way, and someone intentionally using unnecessary jargon that they know to be unnecessary.

In the former case, probably someone simply could not find a better explanation, and used the most intuitive wording they were able to find.

In the latter case, probably someone is trying to sound "smart" (for some definition of "smart"), even knowing that there is a much better way to explain the same ideas.

This difference is usually observable.

The Cringe of Unnecessary Inspeak wrote:[...] We spend so much time using these learned languages of our industries that it is easy to forget that much of what we say sounds like gobbledygook to those who don't encounter it every day. And while this shorthand can be useful to quickly communicate ideas frequently discussed or to generate the shared language of a work culture, it can also be harmful as a form of exclusionary inspeak used to identify those in the know from those that are outside the know.

This can be empowering to the people owning the inspeak. It portrays oneself as the expert, so knowledgeable and so close to a process or concept that an informal nickname is assigned. It's kind of like that person at the office who loves to flaunt their relationship with the owner of the company.

To someone not fluent in the inspeak, it presents a challenging dilemma: remain silent in hopes that you can figure out the meaning of the inspeak later or raise your hand to ask what the heck it means. [...]

https://www.vistaprojects.com/how-to-avoid-jargon/ wrote:[...] Jargon is vocabulary or terminology used by a particular professional, technical, or cultural group that’s hard to understand for people outside of the group.

Jargon often leads to overly complicated writing. It can also be a sign that the writer is trying to flaunt their knowledge.

This can be especially true in writing in the engineering field. Technical documents often contain obscure technical terms by necessity. However, authors often fall into the habit of using language that is more complicated than necessary. [...]