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Testing the limits of nactation

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Wednesday, 5 January 2011, at 3:47 p.m.

In Response To: Testing the limits of nactation (Matt Ryder)

I haven't accused Nack of being careless. It's true I have made the "ad hoc" accusation. I probably can't get you to see my point of view in a short amount of space, because the way I perceive systems of definitions is shaped by decades of experience with mathematics and computer programming. After a while one develops a sense for what sort of choices are going to cause headaches 10 or 20 years down the road. In particular, allowing a system of notation or a system of rules to grow organically, by trying to optimize "locally" (in a careful but ad hoc fashion), is almost certainly going to lead to a baroque and cumbersome system in the end.

Software is the most obvious source of examples, but one can see the same phenomenon in certain games like chess or (Japanese) go or Magic: The Gathering. Although I admire all three games, the ad hoc rules in chess (castling, en passant, 50-move rule, ...) and the Japanese system of precedents in go are insane from a game designer's point of view. These rules were not introduced carelessly but the end result is baroque to say the least.

I'd further say that it's especially if you don't care about nactating a position with 1637 legal moves, and plan to use it only for the opening, that it's a questionable use of time to try to master all the latest wrinkles of nactation. Studying Paul and Nack's book will improve your backgammon game. Studying nactation won't, except indirectly, by allowing you to read certain literature more easily and categorize opening data more efficiently. For this latter purpose, a basic grasp of nactation suffices. What benefit is there to learning what a red c means? I'd say there's none unless you really have your eye on mastering the full system. And in that case, I maintain that you should be concerned about the risks of organic growth.

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