kiho park wrote:I think it also better to find another spaceship speeds.
You made the key first contribution to a
31c/240 spaceship -- doesn't that count? It's almost ready to fly now.
Sphenocorona wrote:Unfortunately there is no good definition of "partial" for diagonal and knightship sorts, which would be very helpful.
This seems like something that is really hard to define clearly. It takes quite a bit of experience with WLS to know when it's worth continuing a search, and/or how exactly to reduce an impossibly huge search space to a manageable size.
At first glance I would say that this c/8 diagonal partial pattern is the kind of WLS result that's almost guaranteed to be disappointing... not that I have much experience with WLS myself, but I tend to worry any time a pattern stubbornly keeps getting wider and wider toward the trailing edge of the search. WLS can often figure out a way to stabilize a new cell as part of a spaceship -- but if each stabilization requires adding another unsolved cell (or two or three), then you're actually losing ground, not gaining it.
The huge size of the search space basically guarantees that WLS will eventually wander off into the weeds and start trying all combinations of ON and OFF cells in an area that will take thousands of years of CPU time to explore completely. There might actually be an answer out there, but that doesn't mean that WLS is likely to come across it before you run out of patience with the search -- or get too old to remember why you were running it...!