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Why use Nactation?

Posted By: Stick
Date: Sunday, 16 January 2011, at 8:28 p.m.

I'm a fan of one post or thread covering a topic so that it can be referenced later when the next person comes along and asks the same question. Tom Keith at bkgm.com has a nice depository for such backgammon posts. When I ramble on in one of these posts they are typically long though and take a lot of energy to make them worthwhile so I'm a bit lazy about doing it when I know it needs done. Such posts should exist for the pros and cons (if there are any) of clocks, of what to expect for first timers attending a tournament (both US and overseas), maybe how each bot should be set up for the unfamiliar bot user, and on and on and on.

I was waiting to see how Nack replied to the most recent inquiry about Nactation and why it's used. He replied as I would have guessed knowing what I know of Nack, preferring to try to avoid tooting his own horn and allowing other suckers such as myself to do it for him. I held out for a few hours hoping for a satisfactory response thinking maybe David Rockwell would pipe up but nothing yet so you're stuck with Stick.

The original question is why should your standard backgammon player use Nactation? What's in it for him more or less. This question isn't quite the same as why is Nactation used, but I'll try to cover both.

The honest reason why your standard bg player should become at least familiar with the basic components of Nactation are that they read these forums and want to understand all the free world class advice that is being put out there by people like Nack, David, Neil, etc... That, in my eyes, is the main reason 'you' should learn Nactation.

The real question is why do these people, the Nacks, Neils, and Davids of the world, use Nactation? As leobueno aptly noted in his question, conventional notation is intuitive, understood by all, and easy to learn so why do we need a new system?

A few of us love this new system for many reasons. Nack, probably in his journey to write his Backgammon Openings series, created a clever system that would allow one letter or symbol to stand for how a roll was played. This affords us the possiblity to:

  • Keep file names short with meaning. For example, I have literally thousands of opening phase of the game rollouts, how would I know what is contained in each file without Nactation? Would I have names like "Second roll 63 after opening 54 splitting"? What a mess of file names that would be. You know what isn't a mess ... 54S-63. Right there in those few keystrokes I've summed up how the first roll was played. If I tried to use old notation in file names you can imagine how rough that would be. 54-24/20-13-8.63 or something of the sort? Sick.

  • Since I also have a web site and exchange an endless amount of emails with players also discussing the opening or linking to my opening rollouts, it makes my links and the discussion much crisper. Again, we have a way to describe precisely what is going on and save a ton of keystrokes and confusion.

  • I don't think Nack had this in mind when he was creating it but tough break, can't go back now. I use Nactation when I'm hand recording matches on paper. This makes it sooooo much faster and saves sooooo much garbled writing. This takes a certain level of competence with Nactation but once achieved you'll never turn back to the way of the old. If I'm watching a match and I want to note down an opening sequence to check later or even if I want to record the entire damn game without the players involved knowing (mwhahaha) I can act like I'm texting on my cell phone and using your basic notepad put the game in as they play without missing a beat. You wouldn't be able to do that with standard notation.

  • By combining Nactation with Nacbracs we're able to keep a lot of data in a short amount of space and avoid having to open files to extract it. For example, let's say I wanted to get across to you the results of an opening 54 played 24/20 13/8 and the candidate plays of a 63 reply for money.

    There are 3 candidate plays, 13/7 8/5*, 24/18 8/5*, and 24/15. Now if I was typing out all of the that I could type that 13/7 8/5* is better than 24/18 8/5* by .014 and better than 24/15 by .021. See how messy all that looks in comparison to:

    54S-63 [H X14 R21] /15

    In my line I was even able to include what bot it was rolled out with, identified by the forward slash, /, and how many trials denoted by '15' which represents 15552 trials. This may look oddly foreign to you in the beginning, and that's why Nack includes a key in all of his posts. Nack post with key example. This is such a better system and really doesn't take that much work to become accustomed to understanding it.

There are secret uses of Nactation that few but the true junkie will know. For example, about two weeks ago I went to my weekly trivia night and one of the questions was 'Where is the '$' symbol found on a keyboard?' Nobody in my group of people was sure and I can't say for certain if I would have been even though I am on a computer 24/7/365 without Nactation. That slot symbol is at the number 4 key and I could never forget it. Thanks Nack, I think we took 13th place out of 30 or so teams with your help.

Nactation was originally developed to describe the opening phase of the game. It has developed into a full system that can be used to nactate entire games if you're familiar enough with it and sick enough to do it. There is no ambiguity for 99.X% of the plays involved. It's all a matter of how well you know it. It has to be learned but is also very intuitive once you get the basic symbols under your belt. If you have any problems all the experts are hanging around here to help answer your questions.

Nactation Tutorial

Adobe Reader. You will need this installed (or something similar) to be able to read .pdf files. Most everyone has this already installed but recently I tripped across a couple people who didn't.

Collection of Nactation reference material thanks to storm. Nack has also mentioned recently that he is working on an update to the tutorial that many I'm sure are salivating over.

It's quite possible I've even forgotten some of the uses of Nactation and I will return to this post later and edit it to be more thorough. Or, another unknown use of Nactation could spring up in the future. If anyone thinks of anything useful to add to this post please let me know and I'll be happy to add it.

Stick

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