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BGonline.org Forums
How to nactate 52S-54-g 13/9 8/3*
Posted By: Nack Ballard In Response To: How to nactate 52S-54-g 13/9 8/3* (Timothy Chow)
Date: Tuesday, 4 January 2011, at 1:42 a.m.
1. What is the maximum possible number of different legal plays in a backgammon position? I seem to recall that there are positions where there are hundreds of ways to play 11. Call this number N.
2. Are there at least N different Nactation characters?...
Counting letters only (i.e., excluding symbols and numerals), there are 26 x 16 = 416 distinct letter representations. For reasons beyond the scope of this post, allocation is often not going to be efficient, so I don't know if 416 is enough to cover every legal play in every position, but I think it's safe to say it's enough to cover any play that is not a triple-whopper.
2. ...If so, have enough rules for Nactation been published for someone to program a computer to assign the correct character to each of the N plays?
Not yet. The next update (on which I'm hard at work) will for sure be enough for someone to program a computer to assign the correct character to (a) any play that is likely to arise in human play, probably enough for (b) any non-triple-whopper, and quite possibly enough for (c) any legal play. This is all predicated on a program being able to distinguish lower-case, italics, underlined and emboldened letters, but it is without tapping into the option of different color typefaces, in case that's an option.
It seems to me that (a) should be sufficient for practical purposes, but feel free to test (b) by asking for the Nactation of as strange a play as you can contrive that is still not a reprehensively terrible move.
That said, please keep in mind that other than puzzle-like plays, one seldom resorts to even a third member of a letter family to describe a normal-looking play!
Nack
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