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Thanks again for the update. You have given us all some very encouraging news. I think maybe some of the anxiety around here lately was due to the fact we hadn't heard from you in such a long time that maybe you were trying to bring about world peace or something like that.


In my initial post, I wrote that the handoff of my management duties had been going very well. That's true, but we did drop the ball on the DMB email newsletter. From its inception through the Oct/06 newsletter, I wrote and/or edited every word of every newsletter, and that's not the best use of my time.

We decided that it would be better for the DMB/Simnasium team to take that over, but with everything else that was going on, that didn't happen.

There are plans to issue a newsletter in the next few days, and this will be the first time I'm not doing it myself. That's a good thing, in my view, since it will allow me to continue working on products instead.

I do hope the DMB community doesn't pitch a fit if the style and content turn out to be different from what went before. I haven't seen a draft of the newsletter, so I don't know what it will look like. If it does turn out to be different, that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'll still be contributing to the newsletter from time to time, but trying to do everything myself hasn't been the right answer for years, and we'll be a stronger team if we move beyond that model.

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One thing that I would like to add to the mix for the future would be the ability to construct reports with any (or all the data points) regardless of type. For example, I would really like the ability to put batting and fielding statistics on the same report page, rather than having to constantly flip back and forth between different reports.


Understood. This has been on my personal wish list for years, and while it won't be in 9b, I've already done some background work to move us in that direction. No promises, though.

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One other thing you might be able to clear up. Why does the Computer Manager seem to get all the breaks.


Boy, it's tough to respond to a comment like this. I know, because I wrote all of the code, that there's absolutely nothing in the game that favors the human manager or the computer manager in any way, but I don't know how to convince you of that.

In my view, the computer manager has an edge in certain tactical decisions because it's a machine that will never forget to look at certain options and can use its computing power to gain small advantages here and there. On the other hand, the human manager has an edge because, well, humans are smarter than computers when it comes to complex decision making. Overall, even though I'm trying to make the computer manager smarter, I believe a good human manager is still better. I hope to close that gap over time, but no matter how hard I try, I don't know if I'll ever get to the point where the advantage swings to the computer.

But when it comes to the generation of on-field events, there's no connection whatsoever. The code that evaluates the batter-pitcher matchup and generates play results ... and the code that converts a play result into the commentary you see on the screen ... it has no idea who's managing the teams. It knows what tactical choices were made, but it doesn't have a clue as to whether they were made by a human or the computer manager.