LifeWiki:Tiki bar/Archive/2021

The following is an archive of tiki bar discussions started in 2021.

Automatic categorization of pages under Rule namespace

The first topic that starts in 2021, this is actually a continuation of LifeWiki:Tiki_bar/Archive/2020#2-state_rule_cleanup. Can we set up some mechanism that scans through ruletables on LifeWiki and creates categories for rules with different n_states, neighborhood and symmetry? Hopefully this should not affect the content of ruletables. GUYTU6J (talk) 15:44, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Merge some excessive categories?

I think there's way too many categories for "Patterns with X cells" and "Patterns with Catagolue frequency class X" (see this and this), (100+ cells or 10+ frequency class is when they start to get unneccesary) and they usually don't help the reader at all since there's usually only one page in them. Could we try merging some them to categories like "Patterns with between 200 and 300 cells", which would both be less excessive and more useful to readers? Goldenratio (talk) 14:09, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

• Population: 98, 99, 100-109, 110-119, ..., 190-199, 200-299, 300-399, ..., 900-999, 1000-9999, 10000-99999, (each power of 10)
• Heat: Use same category numbers as population.
• Period, mod: Keep exact.
• Constructible by gliders: 48, 49, 50-59, 60-69, ..., 90-99, 100-199, 200-299, ..., 1000+
• Rotors: Delete all heat/mod/period/population/volatility. Period can be recreated once a non-2 is created.
• Unit cells: Delete period/population/size.
• Eaters: Delete by number of cells.
• Sawtooth: Truncate population to nearest hundred below 1000, then keep 1000+ category. (Also, shouldn't 1163 have an expansion factor of 2?)
• Frequency class: Round to integer. HotdogPi (talk) 14:42, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Agree with basically all of these. Will take some effort to implement, but this seems like a much better way of organizing things IMO. Any objections from anyone else? Ian07 (talk) 15:08, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

I would like to register a very strong opposite-of-an-objection. Mean to say, I'd like to vote in favor of all of these items -- especially if I don't have to do too much of the work, since I'm still very much more likely to break anything related to LifeWiki categories, than to be able to fix them successfully. Dvgrn (talk) 15:42, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

Should be all done now. Just a few entries left in Special:WantedCategories but those should go away on their own shortly. Ian07 (talk) 03:27, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Nevermind, they don't seem to want to go away. Dangit! This was one of the few Special pages that was actually working properly! Ian07 (talk) 21:01, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

Alright, looks like editing the affected articles worked. (thanks User:GUYTU6J) Ian07 (talk) 11:27, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

"Featured article" system?

I proposed this yesterday on the Discord (which has it's own page now, yay!), but I'm going to do it formally here. The "featured article" system would be similar to the current system on Wikipedia, a collection of LifeWiki's best articles. We could also replace the "this week's featured article" on the main page with actual featured articles that are LifeWiki's best (currently I believe only about half of those articles are even of somewhat good quality or above) and the system would also encourage the improvement of existing articles. The challenges I see are:

A) What are the "featured article criteria" going to be? Very few articles on LifeWiki are anywhere near the Wikipedia featured article criteria, even if you take out the sourcing requirements.

B) How are we going to nominate a potential featured article and then promote it if it's good enough? There are far too few active LifeWiki editors to run it through something similar to the Wikipedia featured article candidates.

And also, custom signatures. Goldenratio _{talk • contribs} 14:19, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Link Catagolue for glider guns

The recent creation of glider gun collection on Catagolue raised this series of question. Should we link to the collection on the articles for guns? If yes, how to design the format?

For instance, in the case of Gosper glider gun the possibilities are

{{LinkCatagolue|yl30_1_5_74055a5f5e513fd2e62fb8d6117d3f03|patternname=Gosper glider gun|format=linear growth}}

{{LinkCatagolue|gun_30|patternname=Gosper glider gun|format=gun}}

{{LinkCatagolue|guntrue_30|patternname=Gosper glider gun|format=true-period gun}}

The first one (with linear growth apgcode) already exists in the article; but for other guns there may not be a ready yl identifier. The second one links to the smallest gun collection and the third leads to the true-period gun collection, which may not be the actual gun on the article (consider twogun). GUYTU6J (talk) 13:17, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

(EDIT: How do I suppress the hypothetical Category:Pages using gun apgcodes and Category:Pages using true-period gun apgcodes on this page?)

Apologies for the late reply, I apparently missed this while skimming Special:RecentChanges.

I'd say we should stick with the status quo for now. The yl objects give us, at least in a few cases, syntheses and/or sample soups, while the other options don't really provide any additional information. By the way, I can use stdin to find the apgcode of any linear growth, and I even have a list somewhere of apgcodes of certain linear growths on the wiki, but I didn't add them because I didn't think they'd be particularly useful. That might change, though, if and when Shinjuku is updated to support linear growth syntheses, because then we'll be able to use the Box™ to submit the remaining synths from the wiki and have them show up on Catagolue with (hopefully) little to no hassle.

P.S. I suppressed the categories in your message using <nowiki>. Ian07 (talk) 21:59, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

Syntheses in infobox

As a slightly-less-awkward solution to the "canonical vs. cheapest synthesis" problem, I've put together a working prototype that distinguishes between the canonical version of the pattern and its variant with the cheapest synthesis, with links to each, in the "Glider synthesis" and "Identifiers" sections. Thoughts? Ian07 (talk) 22:19, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

The only objection on Discord was some feedback about making the RCT footnote less clunky, so I've now implemented this for the relevant templates and subtemplates. User:MathAndCode also noted that they were planning on doing something like this themselves. Ian07 (talk) 20:05, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

Future of the rulespecial parameter

User:Freywa has told me that he thinks the rulespecial parameter should be removed from Template:PatternDownload. He has been removing it from various pages and I reverted these changes as they were done without discussion, but it did get me thinking about whether the parameter is really necessary. Usually it just lists Conway's Game of Life as the one "important" rule, and I'd imagine that if we start writing articles about OCA patterns, they would probably just list the one rule that's already named in the article title.

I've thought intermittently about putting together some sort of template together to automatically parse rulemin and rulemax to check against a list of "important" rules and automatically list them in the infobox if they fall within the range. It would take some finagling, but it might be feasible, at least for outer-totalistic rules. But that's only going to be if there's sufficient demand. Do people still find this information useful or at least potentially useful, or should it go the way of life105 and life106? Ian07 (talk) 07:03, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm definitely in favor of this particular simplification of the infobox. rulespecial is one of the items that I've filled in from the template without really thinking about it, for far too many articles. The other big annoyances are heat, volatility, and strict volatility... collectively they clutter up the infobox in a lot of cases where they don't really provide any interesting information. They actually make it less pleasant to write articles, and thus decrease the chance that articles get written. Dvgrn (talk) 12:30, 15 July 2021 (UTC)

+1 for getting rid of heat, volatility and strict volatility, I don't think they give useful information except for oscs with (strict) volatility 1. E.g. Do you remember the volatility of Silver's p5 / HWSS emulator and/or has this been useful for you? Scorbie

Why get rid of them? Other strict volatility values like 0 and 0.5 may also be useful. ColorfulGalaxy

Discovery dates: UTC?

I posted this in the LifeWiki forum thread, but it got no response.

Should we use whatever day it is UTC to determine what day something was discovered? I've run into this issue a few times. If we use the discoverer's local time, something could be reduced or synthesized the day before it was discovered. HotdogPi (talk) 13:11, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

I'll admit that I've just been using my local time (eastern US) for the most part. Very self-centered on my part, but it at least avoids the issue of things happening in the opposite order of when they're supposed to. Ian07 (talk) 00:48, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Radical sign template

Should we have a template for the radical sign? (Template:sqrt)
( √radicand) ColorfulGalaxy (talk) 11:50, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

But first, where will it be applied? For those infinite growth patterns with relevant metrics, using plaintext sqrt(x) or x^(1/2)* has become conventional because it is easier to transport to different environments. More complex formulae, if needed, may just as well be rendered in LaTex (say) and inserted as an image.

Another case I can think about now is your own polyomino data where you list "perimeter of convex hull", but it is not clear how that is meaningful in the context of (discrete) cellular automata where things are usually not measured in that manner. So please reconsider the idea and explain in details, before any possibly damaging changes are made to LifeWiki.

* This form can be generalized to other fractional powers, by the way. GUYTU6J (talk) 12:15, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

"Articles" subspace?

What do people think about starting a new main LifeWiki subspace, Articles/{topic_name}?

We already have a Tutorials section, and it's working out quite well. My idea is that there are a lot of interesting recent CGoL projects that could use better documentation -- and not all of them are going to make it into the Conway's Life textbook (in the interests of capping the textbook at, you know, a finite size).

The problem with trying to crowdsource the contents of an article like this in a forum thread is that somebody has to be the primary editor, and incorporate suggestions from everybody's responses. Seems like it would work just as well or better to do all the work collaboratively on the LifeWiki, but somewhere out of the way of the main article collection.

Detailed descriptions of completed projects don't fit well under Tutorials. But something that's intended more as a basic popular introduction to a project doesn't really fit in a regular LifeWiki article, either. Maybe a boiled-down version will eventually make it into the main article, but more likely we could just add a link to the Article/{topic_name} version.

See this forum post for three specific articles that seemed like they might be drafted in an Article subspace. Thoughts? Dvgrn (talk) 14:26, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

I see no reason to object. We could use more introductory texts on Life and CA in general.
~Sokwe 05:35, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

LifeViewer in banner

I notice a link to LifeViewer is now in the banner at the top of the LifeWiki page. Thanks to whoever put this up. It might be better to have LifeViewer hosted locally on LifeWiki rather than a link to the lazyslug.com site. This way it will have immediate access to the Rule repository and be available all the time LifeWiki is available. Currently on the lazyslug.com site the Rule repo gets mirrored on an intermittant basis and the site is sometimes down for maintenance. Chris Rowett (talk) 21:07, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Agreed! Well, the change is one of those user suggestions to conwaylife.com floating around in the forums for a while, and it happened in LifeWiki sector first because it is the easiest place to implement. Really it should apply to the navbar in Home and Forums sectors as well.

Speaking of hosting LifeViewer locally, I recall there is another proposal saying that LifeViewer needs to be VERY easy to access, better be on the Home page along the lines of the previous online Java tool. (It has since been defunct and replaced with some articles as one can see now, but they could just move to another News sector). Hopefully, by doing this, newcomers to the site can get a first impression quickly with the interactive simulator, and also soon become familiar with current status of cellular automata by following links to different sectors of this website. You may talk to our admin Nathaniel on these improvements. GUYTU6J (talk) 06:32, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

(EDIT on November 3: See this original forum thread for further discussion.)

High-period oscillators and ".1"

Should ".1" be removed from these? The period is high enough that there should be no conflicts, except for 50P92.1 which I didn't list below, and 35P12.1 which is a period that has billiard tables but not at only 35 cells and is included in the discussion.

35P12.1

54P17.1

71P17.1 (redirect)

48P22.1

168P22.1

94P27.1

123P27.1

68P32.1

A few spaceships also have this, but at periods 2-4, they're probably not unique. HotdogPi (talk) 13:00, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

I've moved 68P32.1 to 68P32 as there was a pretty clear consensus in favor on Discord. No objections to the others. Ian07 (talk) 22:18, 17 October 2021 (UTC)