[r-t] Anything Goes vs Peals Mean Something

[Richard Smith]

Mark Davies wrote:

> Ah yes, so your recursive definition doesn't allow Triples and Major with a
> true 5040 of Triples and some Major changes tacked on? I can't really see
> why we can't treat that as a true peal.

So I think we're all agree that we want the triples and 
major example to be legal.

> But the recursive definition seems much too lax in one other way (I think
> Don's "sets" definition suffers from this too). Basically you are working at
> the level of individual rows, so in identifying an extent at stage N you can
> take any row from the peal, not just those rung to a method at stage N.

But, aside from the fact Don/Iain allows non-adjacent 
stages, the effect of your rules and of Don's / Iain's are 
identical!  The only difference is that with your 
definition, if you want to pick out isolated rows you have 
to come up with a contrived description in term of methods, 
whereas with Don's / Iain's you don't have to maintain this 
fiction.  That sounds like progress to me.

> Suppose you rang a peal containing a partial extent of Triples and a partial
> extent of Minor. The Minor is false against the Triples, so it can't be
> considered a true peal at the Triples stage. We have no complete extents, so
> it's hard to argue it's true by extents, either. But by your definition, you
> could pick changes out of any part of the Minor touch to make up the extent
> of Triples. It wouldn't matter that what was left over was some Minor
> changes that didn't fit together to make a touch.

You're assuming that the rows missing from the triples 
actually exist in the minor.  In practice, unless you've 
carefully constructed the triples to the contrary, the 
covering bell to the minor won't be at the back in all the 
missing rows of triples, in which case you won't be able to 
do it.

> With ringing quality, yes, we must, because it is a subjective judgement.
> Truth and falsehood shouldn't be a subjective judgement. You can't accept
> false peals from one band because "they are OK about falseness" whilst other
> bands aren't. So sorry, I don't buy this!

The basic disagreement seems to come from the fact that, for 
any restriction you care to consider, without it, it would 
be legal to ring something that none of us really like or 
consider to be 'proper', 'worthwhile' ringing.  But with the 
restriction, not only do you prevent people from ringing 
whatever it was you wanted excluded, but a small number of 
obscure things that are worthwhile and that we wouldn't 
really want excluded.

MBD (and, I think, GACJ, but less so) seems to think it is 
more important to excluded the worthless things even at the 
expense of excluding other obscure but interesting things. 
DFM, IJA and I are, I think, all of the opinion that you 
should exclude very little at all, and certainly not if it 
risks excluding something that is potentially interesting or 
worthwhile.

RAS