Throgmorton's Hydra

The Trellis Abridged Morning Crescent Primer has a number of helpful suggestions for coping with moves of high technical precision, viz:

"Do not be alarmed by the apparently astonishing precision of an opponent's moves. In many cases this can be little more than a psychological bluff, designed to cause you to question whether your own moves are accurate enough to carry you through. Remain steadfast, continue your own game plan, and see whether your opponent can retain his accuracy over several moves. If not, his resolve will falter as his manoeuvres gang askew, and very soon the advantage will be yours.

…

"However, some opponents do fully intend to retain their initial high level of precision, and there are only two or three truly successful ways of countering them. These techniques (The Precision Game, The Art of the Feint, and of course Throgmorton's Hydra) are described in Chapters 12, 14 and 20 …" (Mrs Trellis)

Throgmorton's Hydra is a term describing an advanced method for dealing with opponents who make moves of extremely high technical precision. The essence of the tactic is to play a series of junction stations so that the opponent becomes swamped under an exponentially increasing – and self-inflicted – computational workload. The method is particularly useful against the more sophisticated MC-playing computer programs.

[SM]

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