  The fundamental strong interaction determines the nature of pulsar-like
compact stars which are essentially in the form of bulk strong matter. From an
observational point of view, it is proposed that bulk strong matter could be
composed of strangeons, i.e. quark-clusters with there-light-flavor symmetry of
quarks, and therefore pulsar-like compact objects could actually be strangeon
stars. The equation of state (EOS) of strangeon stars is described in a
Lennard-Jones model for the purpose of constraining the EOS by both the tidal
deformability $\Lambda$ of GW170817 and $M_{\rm TOV}$. It is found that the
allowed parameter space is quite large as most of the Lennard-Jones EOS models
satisfy the tidal deformability constraint by GW170817. The future GW
detections for smaller values of $\Lambda$ and mass measurement for larger
values of $M_{\rm TOV}$ will help a better constraint on the strangeon star
model.
