Hedgeworth, Bigsby, and Tiebelle

"Teal won twenty-two," said a teal-group rabbit, out of breath. "Gold won twenty-five. So gold wins, right? We have to know by Friday. The posters get hung on Friday."

Hedgeworth pushed his spectacles up his nose, which meant that the first part of the job was his. "First," he said, "we say only what the data can actually say." He studied their result sheets carefully. Several deals in each were marked not sure yet, searches the solver had not finished in time. "With those unknowns included honestly, teal's rule won at least twenty-two and at most twenty-seven of the forty. Gold's rule won at least twenty-five and at most twenty-nine." He drew the two ranges on his clipboard as two neat horizontal bars, one above the other.

Tiebelle stepped forward next, as quietly as ever, and raised her ribbons. She laid the teal ribbon along teal's range and the gold ribbon along gold's range. And there it was, plain for everyone to see: they overlapped. A long stretch of teal lay directly across a long stretch of gold.

"Wherever they cross," she said softly, "either rule could turn out to be the better one. Gold's truth could be as low as twenty-five. Teal's could be as high as twenty-seven. With ranges like these, nobody gets the crown yet. Right now, it's a tie."

The gold group groaned in unison. "But Friday!"

That was when Bigsby set his tall stack down on the table with a soft, heavy thump. "Then we don't argue about it," he rumbled. "We test more deals. Your ranges are wide for two reasons. Forty deals isn't very many, so luck still has a loud voice. And some searches ran out of time. We can fix both."

So they did, all of them together. They ran both rules on two hundred deals, the same two hundred for each rule so the comparison stayed fair, and they asked the solver to search a little longer on each so that fewer deals came back unsettled. It took the entire afternoon. Bigsby carried stack after stack between the tables. Nobody complained, not even the gold group, who had stopped worrying about Friday and started watching the numbers come in.

When the last results arrived, Hedgeworth drew the new ranges. They were far shorter now, tight little bars instead of long ones, because two hundred deals leave luck much less room, and fewer unknowns leave much less gap between at-least and at-most. Tiebelle held her ribbons up again beside the new bars, and this time something had changed. The ribbons had pulled apart. The gold ribbon now sat clearly higher than the teal one, with a clean strip of empty space between them where neither reached.

"Now," said Tiebelle, and she finally smiled, "now there's a winner. The gold rule really does win more deals than the teal rule. Not by a lot. But by enough that the evidence can say so without any doubt left in the gap. You've earned the right to put that on your poster."

The gold group cheered. And then, to everyone's surprise, the teal group cheered too. It turned out it felt good to get a real answer, even when the answer wasn't yours. It was solid. You could build on it.

Hedgeworth turned to the teal rabbit who had first come running in. "If you'd simply written 'gold wins' on Friday, from the first forty deals," he asked, "would you have been wrong?"

The rabbit thought about it for a long moment. "No," she said slowly. "Gold does win. But we'd only have been right by luck. We wouldn't have known we were right. Now we actually know."