On 2/19/07, Winter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > With version 0.94 (yes, I know 0.95 is out), winning percentage is > shown alongside valuation, which raises a question. > > When simming a game to see how I did, what should I do when the play > with the highest win % does not have the highest valuation?
Years ago I used to have rules for myself for stuff like this. I rarely fully analyze my games anymore, and I definitely don't keep records of my error rates. There's no official way to analyze a game, and I'm reluctant to endorse this kind of thing. Even if there were a very perfect way to reduce how well or poorly a person played in a game to a number, doing so would accomplish very little. It can be interesting, but so is figuring out the highest scoring 4x4x3x3 in Super Scrabble. And like that, it's ultimately useless for becoming a top player. There are many ways to improve without knowing exactly how well you're playing. I'd rather see the interesting positions than the final stats. I don't want to be too snobby about this, and people are welcome to discuss this if they like. I'll just abstain. Jason's view isn't far from mine, so it is unlikely that an answer to your question will ever appear in Quackle documentation. I like to think of a Scrabble game being like a hand of poker. If a poker player wants to know if he's a winning player, he probably wouldn't do it by analyzing his decisions on every hand. Some hands and some games are more interesting than others, and it's worthwhile to discuss and sim those, but it's an inexact science. If you really want to know how well you're playing, I'd look at the results after a statistically significant sample of games. If you play at the same Scrabble club every week and you have a better record and better average margin now than you did last year, that probably means something, and the great thing is that it accounts for all of the things that sims can't. If Quackle's report function becomes more sophisticated, I'd rather have it classify the types of errors a player makes. Graph the lengths and playabilities of the words they miss, etc. More like the teacher's comments on a report card than the letter grade itself. John O'Laughlin
