hotdogPi wrote: ↑May 8th, 2024, 8:41 am
For 4-digit periods that are a 3-smooth number times a number under 1000, automatically add semi/tremi/quadri-snarks to the 3-digit periods to create the 4-digit period if it would result in a reduction...
"Automatically" is going to be kind of a tall order, isn't it? Or rather, we could automatically build working guns, but they mostly won't be optimal -- custom welding tricks will sometimes help, or sometimes the base gun will have a Herschel factory that can be period-multiplied at a lower cost than using *i-Snarks -- or sometimes a different glider output from the one that the base gun uses will turn out to work better, etc., etc.
When Chris Cain was keeping track of the gun collection, there was a
category at the bottom called "tentative guns" -- something along the lines of "
calculations say that building this using such-and-such gun family might improve on what we have, at least if the welds and glider crossings and so on happen to work out just right". When one of those guns got built, it would get removed from the "tentative" list, and would get added to the "confirmed" list if it did in fact break a record.
Maybe this hypothetical script should just attempt a survey along these lines, rather than actually trying to build the "tentative guns" in question? Could just provide the raw materials -- the current optimized base gun, and relevant options for period multipliers. We've probably got enough gun-building experts these days that we could collectively make short work of a checklist of hopeful candidates, once we know where to look for sub-optimal stuff.
Also is there a reason not to go after 5-smooth numbers while we're at it?