biggiemac42

The post (and my previous waterbear post) both talk about universal construction, it is equivalent to glider construction. There are patterns which have N generations of predecessor but not N+1, which are also non-constructible.

I would say "the educated public" is already the target audience for my blog. Game of life topics are notoriously hard to disentangle from their jargon, and I went to some effort here but needed to balance that against the goal to remain accurate.

My hope is that by reading only the amount of background on the blog already in the Waterbear post (referenced immediately in the introduction), you have all you need to grok the post. But that's certainly an optimistic hope, and maybe unfounded.

Right, as far as I can tell the term "semilator" was coined for this task, so google won't help.

The middle of the RCT pattern where all of the action happens, reads its first bit 2^N generations B.S (before singularity, or before splat, whichever you prefer). Next bit is 2^(N-1) B.S. Next would be 2^(N-2), but this is what the semilator changes.

During the franky enormous gap between 2^(N-1) and 2^(N-2) generations B.S, extra spaceships come in at an orthogonal direction. These have two possible configurations, giving equivalent results to either of the possible bit reads. This accelerates the speed of bit reading, and means that N of millions can be emulated by a pattern with N less than 30. Much less initial distance, much less time. The addition of millions of cells of spaceships doesn't make the overall pattern smaller in an informational sense, just in the scale of time and distance between its constituent parts.

Ooh, I appreciate the diligence! The numbers here came from manually fiddling with more granular output from Pavgran's special purpose "profiler" script. One of those steps, where the DBCA assumes control of the bit stream, takes 1615 gliders. I would bet I made a mistake and added it twice, probably to both the DBCA building and the task of the DBCA itself. It belongs in only one of them!

I can verify this later.

LMAO I found outdated info on that wikipedia page, in the best way.

"Some patterns require a very large number (sometimes hundreds) of glider collisions"

I think the portion that is fundamental is deeper than game of life itself. Game of life is a rule set with sufficient complexity to get this far, but it isn't the only one. Anything with this class of behavior will support systems including those resembling DNA, the question is at what scale it emerges. If the scale is too big (arguably the scale for the result in this post is too big), it's a less elegant kind of emergence.

To clean up the mistakes in your summary:

4 gliders hit each other to make a stream of gliders. This isn't a gun, because a gun costs more. instead it's a GPSE, which looks like a gun from the barrel end, but has a limit. As it approaches that limit, the RCT mechanism lets another three GPSEs generate an arbitrary list of bits, controlled by the precise location of the first (as a binary number). The final count 15 comes from the naive 4×4 minus one from being able to piggyback one of the constructions off a neighbor to save a single glider.

From bits to an embedded turing machine is gol magic that the blog post treats better than my comment could.

Definitely worth trying to learn! As with most topics, it starts out seeming hard to grasp, and then you start naming things and recognizing them. What looks like jargon to an outsider is just a compressed way of communicating. The people in the community are smart and tend to compress their ideas really far which makes the jargon even more extreme.

Advanced gol is just getting past that first hurdle of understanding the densely compressed info behind the jargon. And it doesn't ever need to be done for all of the concepts. You can be versed in just one. I started out in a super specialized corner in self constructing spaceships. That said I'm a bit of a whiz in other areas so I can't be used as evidence that it works for everyone..

It can! A seed constellation for the initial gliders would be possible using the extra debris from the original collision. Without using that debris, there might be a problem reaching far enough without adding extra bits that each double the amount of reaching to get to the right starting point. So I think would be a specialized recipe for a couple reasons.

Hi there, I'm the author (of the blog post, not of the achievement itself)! So glad this is spreading. Feel free to ask here or on the post for more clarification if stuff is too unclear