Sawtooth 201
| Sawtooth 201 | |||||||
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| Pattern type | Sawtooth | ||||||
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| Number of cells | 201 | ||||||
| Bounding box | 75 × 55 | ||||||
| Static symmetry | Unspecified | ||||||
| Discovered by | Adam P. Goucher | ||||||
| Year of discovery | 2015 | ||||||
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Sawtooth 201 is a diagonal sawtooth discovered on April 13th, 2015, and is currently the smallest known sawtooth in terms of its minimum repeating population of 201 and in terms of its bounding box. It functions by letting two glider streams of period 46 retract a block, created by collision with a spark from a 58P5H1V1, one cell at a time. The retracted block is deleted via interaction with a blocker, and the streams are allowed to return to the now-farther-away 58P5H1V1 to create another block.
The original design by Tanner Jacobi used a twin bees shuttle to delete the retracted block. Adam P. Goucher noticed that a blocker would suffice on the same day, because the block is retracted every 42 generations--a multiple of the period of a blocker.
Due to a mismatch between the period 46 guns and the period 5 spaceship, full retraction only results in the minimum population every fifth cycle. The expansion factor of this pattern is approximately 37 if each of the five sub-tooths per cycle is counted as a separate peak; if they are not, the expansion factor is about 70,000,000.
External links
- Smaller Sawtooth thread on conwaylife.com forums.