User talk:Ferkel

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WikiProject Cellular automata
Here's your invitation to sign up for WikiProject cellular automata. If you're interested, add your name to the WikiProject Proposals page please. Alpha Omicron 13:54, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
 * (Two years late in replying...sorry!) Hi Alpha Omicron. Did anything come of this proposal? Was it discussed anywhere? Ferkel (talk) 13:24, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I have no idea. I haven't been an active editor for a long while. Alpha Omicron (talk) 04:46, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Reply
(In response to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:William_R._Buckley#The_tone_of_your_comments )

Generally, I don't regret the things that I say. For instance, I gave diligent effort to discovering whether or not the Pesavento corpus can indeed self-replicate. That you have shown self-replicability does in no way lessen the value of my efforts. I was simply wrong in excluding the possibility of self-replication in light of configuration collisions; it was not an unreasonable bet. Indeed, our initial exposure to each other was founded upon my having direct experience with the details of the Pesavento corpus, and you having no such experience; not what I would consider sound practice by a trained scientist. You questioned my knowledge without having any basis for posing the questions; not a friendly act. Yet, what is most distasteful to me is that you challenged me regarding my knowledge, with a promise to act, and upon my completion of effort (so as to assuage your concerns), you reneged on your promise. I put serious effort into generating the analysis of Pesavento; you put no effort at all, even to fulfill your promise to revert changes to the subject article. Granted, as I have since learned, reversion is not a difficult thing to effect. However, when I make a promise, I keep it.

As to subsequent deletions, some were to remove verbiage that I might expect you would find too offensive. That you had read the comments was sufficient to my purpose; no need to cast aspersions for others to read. I notice that you have completely removed all past discussion between us from your talk page. I know that you are allowed to so remove material but, it does look a bit self-serving, particularly in light of your assertion of similar behavior on my part.

What I find unacceptably offensive is for others to question my knowledge on a topic, when they are correspondingly ignorant of that same topic. Your initial "I'm having more concerns about your edits" was offensive to me. NB - you have shown no respect for what I find offensive; the only thing you have shown concern for is that which you find offensive.

All this being said (I think we've both aired our concerns), I think that future correspondence will be significantly more congenial; our battle is not unlike that of youthful boys defining their interrelationships on a schoolyard - some conflict, which resolves into rapprochement.

Thanks for posting your concerns on my talk page. William R. Buckley (talk) 17:51, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Self-Replication Changes
Though I have looked only quickly, it does appear that the changes you have made are suitable. I will have ample opportunity to make changes (if any) over the weekend. Thanks. William R. Buckley (talk) 22:59, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

In reviewing further, I believe you should also consider inclusion of my NCA work. I will send you some Golly files, so that you may be familiar with the capabilities of these configurations. Recall that I have given two NCA configurations, and two vNCA configurations within the Automata 2008 proceedings. William R. Buckley (talk) 23:19, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

I should also say that I much prefer the images now used, to those of prior editions of this Wikipedia article. William R. Buckley (talk) 23:21, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Finally, it is my judgement that one may construct an NCA self-replicator in no more than 5500 cells, and perhaps as low as 5000 cells; corpus only. By this, I mean endoperimetric cells, which includes those ground state cells found within the perimeter of the corpus. William R. Buckley (talk) 23:23, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Self-Replicator Statistics
The provision of bounding rectangle within the table is a significant improvement. To be complete, we should list all four of the configurations I gave, two each for NCA and vNCA. All have been demonstrated; I'll send you configurations for such demonstration, should you like. My reasoning is two-fold; the signal crossing problem (its efficacy), and the relationship between rule sets. It is quite the case that my purpose was not specifically the construction of a self-replicator; I've done that many times before. I wanted to understand the reason for abandonment by prior researchers, especially in light of the apparent increase in complexity represented by the Codd design (Edward F. Codd, of relational database theory). His PhD thesis presented an 8-state cellular automata. Though I cannot say conclusively, my study suggests that a Codd self-replicator is much larger than is a von Neumann self-replicator. Thus, in 1968, one might have concluded that a vNCA example was much closer at hand than a Codd example. This condition is all the more complex respecting GoL; simple patterns self-replicate (I consider the glider to be a self-replicator) but, their is no work on construction, and so no higher level configuration has been designed.

All this is to suggest that period researchers (Burks, Thatcher, Lee, etc.) viewed the signal crossing problem as a significant hurdle (sufficient to bring efforts at design and demonstration to a halt); I claim otherwise.

Moreover, the development of NCA was expressly for the purpose of simplifying signal crossing.

The measures of performance and design, such as expressed in the article table, would be better placed in context, were the measure of the other three designs included.

Can you offer a counter argument? William R. Buckley (talk) 22:19, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

vNCA Graphics
Thanks for this addition. William R. Buckley (talk) 19:17, 17 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorry about that...
I apologize for that revert I made to your recent edits to Byl's loop, as you merged it to it's alternative name. I've been reverting tons of vandalism made by other users (IP's mainly) today, and this edit was an error on my part. Again, I apologize for the innappropriate warning. Regards, Versus22 talk 22:25, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * No problem! Keep up the good work fighting vandalism. Ferkel (talk) 22:34, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, thank you. Versus22 talk 22:39, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Codd/Reggia/Sayama/Byl and others
I quite like much of the additions you have made to these articles, in you quest to merge them. Thanks. 72.67.103.30 (talk) 20:03, 5 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I know we don't own the articles, but it was pretty hard to gather all the info that was at, so it was somewhat disappointing to see almost all of it stripped out by merging the article. I'm not against the merger, but I don't think throwing information away is the way to go. Please consider recovering some of the info of the article. Regards, Waldir talk 10:52, 6 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi Waldir. Sorry to have trodden on your toes. Some of the Byl page is now contained in the comparison table: the timesteps and the size comparisons. We've lost the following: Byl's university, the rules count, and the Sigmund quote. We might add the rules comparison back in but it's a tricky issue: do we expand for symmetries?, is the comparison useful when some rulesets have different neighbourhoods? The Sigmund quote I thought was a bit confusing in the context - see the page on the von Neumann universal constructor for references that say that JvN wasn't considering a 'complexity threshold' for replication. Do you think this controversy in the literature is worth presenting? Ferkel (talk) 11:45, 6 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Nevermind the quote, it was somewhat confusing to me, too. I only added it to help make the article a little more complete since there was so little info available on the subject.
 * However, I believe that the description of Byl's simplification was clearer in the original article, from the point of view of a non-technical reader; perhaps the description in the table could be expanded a bit -- afterall, the images in the right column make each row tall enough to contain a reasonable amount of text :) -- I'll leave that to you, since you obviously are more knowledgeable in the subject than me :).
 * Finally, I believe the ruleset at http://cafaq.com/apps/index.php should be kept; The rest of the article, I must admit, is not that essential. Thanks for the kind reply. --Waldir talk 15:02, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

File source problem with File:VonNeumann_universal_constructor.PNG
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Turmite notation
Hello. What does the second digit in your notation for turmite programs mean? I mean this one, for example: {{{1, 2, 0}, {1, 2, 1}}, {{0, 1, 0}, {0, 1, 1}}}. I know this is a new direction for a turmite, but what is the meaning behind 2, or, say, 1? Thanks -- 87.252.227.61 (talk) 18:54, 10 December 2011 (UTC)
 * It's Ed Pegg, Jr.'s notation, from the Mathematica notebook here: http://www.mathpuzzle.com/26Mar03.html : 1=noturn, 2=right, 4=u-turn, 8=left. It is a bit cryptic. The idea is to allow turmites to split and turn in two directions, thus 10 would mean 8+2 = left and right. Golly has some more turmite examples and has a script (Scripts/Python/Rule-Generators/Turmite-gen.py) to read this notation. Ferkel (talk) 20:22, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you! -- 87.252.227.61 (talk) 21:19, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Near-miss Johnson solids
Hi Ferkel! I have recently been exploring footballs, pentagons surrounded by  hexagons, then this led me to hexagons surrounded by pentagons, which eventually led me to the 'near miss' johnson solid and puckered carbon rings. I think there is an inaccuracy in the statement that the non-planar hexagon has angles of 108 and 132. Also I have made a few other conjectures. However I am new to wikipedia, so am loathe to edit anything unless somebody moderates it first. Does anyone take charge of a page that I can talk to? So far I have just added my ruminations as 'feedback' on a talk page. I would be grateful if you could look at  this and let me know if there is anything of use/ of interest  there? Regards Tom Heyes   Tommybobbles (talk) 06:35, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

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