[r-t] Ben Constant's Yorkshire Royal

[Mark Davies]

Eddie writes,

> The idea that all possible comps & methods have been around at least since 
> the Big Bang and are not invented but merely discovered,  is really quite 
> old.

It's an interesting concept, isn't it. When you see a search space which has 
been explored by various human composers for decades (e.g. tenors-together 
Surprise Max) exhausted in a few hours by a computer search, it seems very 
real.

In practice some search spaces are plenty small enough that we could imagine 
their contents already exists, even before we start looking. What about 
larger spaces?

Bobs-only Stedman Triples is a good example. It is, I suspect, much too 
large ever to provide an exhaustive enumeration - what is it, something like 
10^25 or something? Very big, anyway. But consider this thought experiment. 
Divide the search space up by establishing a large number of call prefixes 
below which the search tree is accessible. Now write a simple program which, 
given the call prefix, will output all the compositions from it. (You can 
assume a rotational sort if you want only the distinct roundblocks).

Plug all this (the prefixes and the search program) into a server and stick 
a web front end over it. The first page of the website says, "This site 
contains all possible bobs-only touches of Stedman Triples". Some small 
print advises that, because there are so many compositions, only a page at a 
time will be shown. The user can click "Next" to get to the next page, or 
type in a page number. There are probably hundreds of billions of pages, but 
for any one, the webserver will come back after a few milliseconds and show 
you the compositions.

Who would be convinced, given such a website to play with, that every 
bobs-only composition of Stedman Triples already exists?

MBD