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Cubeful equities: how to derive from cubeless?

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Thursday, 7 January 2010, at 2:33 a.m.

In Response To: Cubeful equities: how to derive from cubeless? (Matt Ryder)

Matt Ryder wrote:

But taking a peek behind the wizard's screen, it seems enormous improvements are still quite possible. Which is exciting.

Well, maybe. It's clear that there are many unexplored avenues to try, even without any radically new ideas. What's not clear is that these unexplored avenues will lead to appreciably stronger bots. Janowski's formulas may look kludgy, but the bots play very well notwithstanding. Doing things in a more "mathematically correct" manner might be intellectually satisfying, but there's no guarantee that it will make that much difference in practice.

The other thing to be aware of is that there's not much incentive for people to work hard to improve the bots. Certainly the financial incentive is pretty low. Another potential source of incentive is the prestige accompanying the publication of a brilliant new idea; this drives a lot of academic work. There is not a lot of this kind of incentive either. So even if there is a lot of room for improvement, it's not clear that anyone will be motivated to put in all the requisite work. The small number of people developing the current bots have done and continue to do admirable work, but they have limited time and resources.

Having said all that, I do agree that there is definitely potential for significant future improvements, and that it is worth thinking about ways to achieve them.

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