What it means for something to be "known"?
Posted: June 20th, 2024, 7:12 pm
What it means for a reaction, a pattern, a ruleset, a CA-related concept to be "known"? Should there be a written explanation or an overview somewhere, aiming to answer this question?
(Could there be a written explanation or an overview, or the idea is self-contradictory or otherwise doomed?)
Sometimes people ask "Is this known?" Sometimes people say something along the lines of "that's a trivial oscillator", "there are too many reactions of this type to list all known reactions", or "this reaction is a variant of that known reaction". Sometimes that leads to discussions and/or arguments; other times that leads to loss of curiosity (because they say it's known/trivial/etc).
There are tricky cases, e.g. finding a previously unknown and unexpected way to connect two previously known conduits via some nontrivial modification or welding, or finding a more compact pattern where some block catalyst is shared between two components, or any other unexpected way to get previously known things involved, or what have you.
Lots of "new things" are built out of "old things", but this doesn't really give a good overview which could be reasonably linked to, which leads to the above questions.
(Could there be a written explanation or an overview, or the idea is self-contradictory or otherwise doomed?)
Sometimes people ask "Is this known?" Sometimes people say something along the lines of "that's a trivial oscillator", "there are too many reactions of this type to list all known reactions", or "this reaction is a variant of that known reaction". Sometimes that leads to discussions and/or arguments; other times that leads to loss of curiosity (because they say it's known/trivial/etc).
There are tricky cases, e.g. finding a previously unknown and unexpected way to connect two previously known conduits via some nontrivial modification or welding, or finding a more compact pattern where some block catalyst is shared between two components, or any other unexpected way to get previously known things involved, or what have you.
Lots of "new things" are built out of "old things", but this doesn't really give a good overview which could be reasonably linked to, which leads to the above questions.