Thread:ClariS/@comment-98.201.177.181-20130104231418/@comment-75.143.77.86-20130108160056

I can't think of an actual patch that serves as a good example of what I'm talking about, but I'll tell you the reasoning behind the examples I'm making.

I'll use the word shortcut instead of the word heuristic. Looking at "gold value" is a shortcut for the times we want to get a quick judgement about an item compared to another. Like most shortcuts, it makes some mistakes, but it still gives us an vague idea of what's better.

In order to check how good the shortcut is, we want to see how easy it is to make up  situations where the shortcut tells us the "wrong" answer. Since item builds are a bit complicated, the wrong answer might not be obvious. So we can instead try to make up situations where we're pretty confident the right answer has not changed, but the shortcut gives us different answers.

If it's easy to get the shortcut to switch answers while leaving everything the same, then we can expect the shortcut to fool us pretty often. Its results are, in a sense, arbitrary. A perfect shortcut would only switch answers when the right item to build changes. That's usually too much to ask for in something as complicated as item builds, but we can at least try to get a feel for how close we are.

In my example, I was trying to make a situation where:

1) The gold value shortcut for comparing items in the same tier switches answers.

2) The correct item to build has not changed.

3) It doesn't seem cheesy. It's easy to make an example if an item has stats your character doesn't use, but most people don't use the gold value shortcut in this situation anyway (I hope). It would be nice to have a situation where the shortcut would actually fool people.