> The third and fourth arms are extreme compression construction arms "ecca", where a programming language interpreter is created and individual incoming letters are interpreted as instructions specifying which phase (mod 2) and line of glider to emit.
As the wiki page states, the period is 133076755768, and it moves by two cells in that time. Spaceships in GoL by definition don’t leave anything behind, they produce the exact same configuration, just shifted across the grid.
Given that it starts as a single line, it is symmetric in the axis implied by that line, and hence can’t possibly move diagonally or orthogonal to the line. Hence it moves in the direction of the line.
Yeah, “orthogonal” here just means “not diagonal”. Since GoL configurations don’t have a distinguished orientation (you can rotate and/or mirror them however you like), it wouldn’t make sense to specify up/down/left/right, at least not without first fixing an (arbitrary) orientation.
I’m not sure where our guidelines/norms are on this kind of thing, but I get the sense that most of us feel very capable of pasting articles into LLMs ourselves.
What we’re less capable of—and the reason we look to each other here instead—is distinguishing where the LLM’s errors or misinterpretations lie. The gross mistakes are often easy enough to spot, but the subtle misstatements get masked by its overconfidence.
Luckily for us, a lot of the same people actually doing the work on the stuff we care about tend to hang out around here. And often, they’re kind enough to duck in and share.
Thank you in any case for being upfront about it. It’s just that it’d be a shame and a real loss if the slop noise came to drown out the signal here.
That's kind of amazing. I wish someone unpacked the units of abstraction/compilation that must surely exist here.
Surely they aren't developing this with 1 or 0 as the abstraction level!