Maybelle

When the results slid out of the solver on a strip of paper, the rabbits' whiskers sagged all at once.

"Ours won fewer," said the oldest, whose name was Clover. "Fewer! How can more moves possibly win fewer games?"

Nobody had an answer. Two of the younger rabbits had already begun crumpling the strip, ready to toss the whole idea in the bin.

Maybelle tilted her head. "Hmmm," she said. "May I see that before it's a ball?"

She smoothed the paper flat on the table and read it slowly, line by line. Beside each deal, the solver had printed one of three words. Won. Lost. Or not sure yet. And the rabbits, she saw, had counted only the wins. Every other deal, lost and not-sure-yet alike, they had lumped together as a failure.

"Look how many not sure yets are here," Maybelle said, and touched her nose to them one after another. "Under your rule there are a great many. Far more than under the normal one."

"So?" said a rabbit. "Not sure is the same as not winning."

"It isn't, though," said Maybelle, and her voice was warm but very clear. "Those three words mean three completely different things. Won means the solver found a path to victory and can show it to you. Lost means the solver searched every possible path and proved there's no way through. That's a real finding. But not sure yet means the solver was still in the middle of searching when its time ran out. It hadn't found a win. It also hadn't ruled one out. It simply stopped before the end."

She let them take that in before she went on. "Now think about what your rule does. At every step, it gives the solver more moves to try. More moves means more paths branching off in every direction. More paths means each deal takes longer to search, which means the solver runs out of time more often. Your rule didn't cause more losses. It caused more unfinished searches, and then you counted those as losses."

One by one, she lifted the not sure yet deals off the table and laid them gently in her tray. "A lost deal is an answer," she said. "A not sure yet deal is a question nobody has finished answering. You can't count a question as a no. If you do, you'll believe something false, and you'll believe it with a very confident number attached."

Clover's ears rose slowly. "So our rule might actually be better," she said. "We just can't tell yet."

"Hmmm," said Maybelle, and this time she was smiling. "Maybe. That's exactly the right word. And if you'd like to know whether it can be worse at all, go and see Addison, the bear cub building the block tower. He has a way to reason about your rule without running a single deal. But that's his story. Mine is simpler: the wins you thought you'd lost were sitting in the maybe pile the whole time."