I notice something like “glider guns feel more valuable to me than gliders, and glider-gun-guns (is that a thing?) feel more valuable than glider-guns, but I wouldn’t want the universe tiled with either of them.”
I agree. I think I don’t want the universe tiled with anything really; one (or a handful) of tiles is enough. Maybe a step in the right direction:
Find a library of interesting GoL structures. Declare some to be bad and the rest good. Score = the number of good types that are instantiated minus the number of bad. So making more than one of the same structure doesn’t help. A more sophisticated algorithm would give you points equal to the log of the number of a structure.
I notice something like “glider guns feel more valuable to me than gliders, and glider-gun-guns (is that a thing?) feel more valuable than glider-guns, but I wouldn’t want the universe tiled with either of them.”
I agree. I think I don’t want the universe tiled with anything really; one (or a handful) of tiles is enough. Maybe a step in the right direction:
Find a library of interesting GoL structures. Declare some to be bad and the rest good. Score = the number of good types that are instantiated minus the number of bad. So making more than one of the same structure doesn’t help. A more sophisticated algorithm would give you points equal to the log of the number of a structure.