I worked through the excellent nactation: match annotation study late, but boy I'm glad I did. I thought I was really going to struggle, but it's surprisingly easy to nactate deep into the middle game. (It doesn't hurt that the players of the match in question are experts, so we don't have to figure out the nactation characters for monster whoppers.) I only mis-nactated twice (11N and 55I) although I suspect I made some lucky guesses elsewhere.
Nack's extraordinary discussion of the study is well worth a read and contains a number of new nactation insights.
I have only one question:
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The one wrong respondent (who revealed at the outset that he doesn’t know any of the BEACON letters) excluded the right move from contention because he seemed to think that you don’t touch a back checker unless U is used. That is a far cry from the truth, though it does bring up the point that one can reasonably nactate the move played as U, which works either by assumption or by 6pt convention.
Is it really okay to nactate this "U" without assumption (ie "by the 6pt convention")? The original tutorial definition says "U... refers to advancing back checker(s), but no further than the opponent’s bar point". Surely the 2 is thus prohibited from being played on the near side of the board in terms of the strict definition?
Although I'm coming to grips with the logic of overlapping definitions and multiple "correct" nactation characters, it seems to me that overly loose usage of characters which strain against their original definitions will become huge headaches when building a trad to nactation algorithm (as is my ambition).
Matt R