[r-t] 8-spliced touch

[Philip Earis]

The many replies (and considerable progress) regarding decisions have been
interesting, and I tend to agree with the developing consensus that the
"Decisions" framework should be able to categorise any sequence of
permutations, and that deciding what "true" means is pretty important. I
need a bit more of a think about the various questions.

On a different point, I have a problem that should be fairly simple to
solve.  Much as I dislike them, I'm interested in the most musical short
touch of the so-called "standard" 8 surprise major methods. The
constraints are:

- The touch should contain all 8 methods, with a change of method only at
the leadhead.

- Bobs (14) and Singles (1234) at the leadhead are fine.

- The length of the touch should be between 253 changes (ie comes round at
handstroke snap just before 8 leads) and 258 changes (comes round at
backstroke snap).

- Music is defined by occurance of <4-runs> - each appearance of 1234,
2345, 3456, 4567 or 5678 (or their reverses) in a row scores 1. (So rounds
scores 5, the row 56784321 scores 2 etc).

- Truth is not essential, but should ideally be recorded so a sub-list of
true touches can be compared.

- As a supplement, I'd also be interested in the results of touches up to
both 9 leads (+ 2 changes), and 10 leads (+ 2 changes).

The problem is so constrained that I would have thought it should be
possible to solve exhuastively without too much trouble.  Can anybody do
this and supply the results?  Indeed, has anyone done this before?

There are some web-resources which are sort of useful, eg MBD's Elf, but
this can't cope with coming round at the snap, false touches, etc.