Smaller sawtooth

[thunk]

Um... for Sawtooth 177, however, it's perfectly possible to move the spaceship one diagonal step closer, cutting the bounding box by one column. No Dark Side trickery, really, just Yet Another Corollary-Snipe:

The multiplier goes down from 28 to 23, the same odd multiplier as the compactified Sawtooth 189, so the sawtooth only reaches its minimum every other cycle. At 23*(121^N-1) for odd N, the minimum is 187 due to the two boat-bits, so the expansion factor goes up to 121^2 = 14641.

I actually did notice that, but decided to post the new 177 in the expansion factor 121 form, based on the comments chris_c and calcyman made on the prior version (which was indeed originally posted with the ship one step closer.)

I concur; the canonical version should have the minimum expansion factor (121 in this case) and attain its minimum population in generation 0. Subject to those constraints, it's fashionable to minimise the bounding box.

[dvgrn]

I actually did notice that, but decided to post the new 177 in the expansion factor 121 form, based on the comments chris_c and calcyman made on the prior version (which was indeed originally posted with the ship one step closer.)

Yeah, on reading back again I see chris_c actually mentioned the ship's ability to move closer, also.

If it were up to me, I think I'd say that population trumps bounding box, but bounding box trumps expansion factor, so the 73x60 factor-14641 sawtooth would marginally beat the 74x60 factor-121 sawtooth. Luckily Calcyman wrote the LifeWiki article, so we should probably abide by his judgment that bounding box optimization is merely "fashionable".