  The Merit Factor (MF) measure was first introduced by Golay in 1972.
Sequences possessing large values of MF are of great interest to a rich list of
disciplines - from physics and chemistry to digital communications, signal
processing, and cryptography. Throughout the last half-century, manifold
approaches and strategies were proposed for finding such sequences. Referenced
as one of the most difficult optimization problems, Golay wrote that it is a
"challenging and charming problem". His publications on this problem spanned
more than 20 years. Golay himself introduced one beneficial class of sequences,
called skew-symmetric sequences, or finite binary sequences with odd lengths
with alternate autocorrelation values equal to 0. Their sieving construction
greatly reduces the computational efforts of finding binary sequences with odd
lengths and high MF. Having this in mind, the majority of papers to be found in
the literature are focused solely on this class, preferring them over binary
sequences with even lengths. In this work, a new class of finite binary
sequences with even lengths with alternate autocorrelation absolute values
equal to 1 is presented. We show that the MF values of the new class are
closely related to the MF values of adjacent classes of skew-symmetric
sequences. We further introduce new sub-classes of sequences using the
partition number problem and the notion of potentials, measured by helper
ternary sequences. Throughout our experiments, MF records for binary sequences
with many lengths less than 225, and all lengths greater than 225, are
discovered. Binary sequences of all lengths, odd or even, less than $2^8$ and
with MF $>8$, and all lengths, odd or even, less than $2^9$ and with MF $>7$,
are now revealed.
