Hedgeworth

Hedgeworth pushed his glasses up and looked at Pip's results. Then he looked more closely, and his quills rose just a little, the way they do when he notices something.

"Twenty-six won," he said. "And how many lost?"

"Eight," said Pip.

Hedgeworth counted on his small paw. "Twenty-six and eight is thirty-four. You tested forty deals. What happened to the other six?"

Pip's tail drooped. "Oh. Those. The solver said not sure yet. It ran out of time before it could finish them."

"Ah," said Hedgeworth kindly. "Then we have to be careful about what we say."

He turned his clipboard over to a clean side and drew a bar. Then he said, "Let's think about the six unknown deals. Could they all be wins?"

Pip thought. "Maybe. The solver just didn't find the win in time."

"Could they all be losses?"

"Also maybe."

"So the truth is hiding somewhere in between," Hedgeworth said. He wrote two numbers. "If every unknown deal is really a loss, Rule B won twenty-six out of forty. That is the lowest it can be. If every unknown deal is really a win, Rule B won thirty-two out of forty. That is the highest it can be."

He tapped the clipboard. "So the honest sentence is this. Rule B won at least twenty-six and at most thirty-two of these forty deals."

Pip frowned. "That's less exciting than sixty-five percent."

"It is," Hedgeworth agreed. "But sixty-five percent pretends the six unknowns were all losses. We don't know that. If you say sixty-five and a friend runs a longer search and finds three of those six were wins, your number was wrong the whole time. My sentence would still be true. Nobody can catch a careful sentence out."

Pip read it again. At least twenty-six. At most thirty-two. It began to feel less like a letdown and more like a shield.