[r-t] Spliced Courses

Robin Woolley robin at robinw.org.uk
Sat Dec 18 18:47:35 UTC 2010


As you may remember, a couple of years ago I did some work on spliced
courses. I found 72 distinct splices (on eight bells) for either completely
2nds place or 8ths place methods.

Looking at these results further, it seems that if one particular lead end
group appears an odd number of times and it is the only such 'odd' group,
then the splice is palindromic. So,  CEEFFEE is palindromic but BCFDEDD is
not.

Letting an 'odd' group to be a lead-end group appearing an odd number of
times, (and similarly for 'even' groups), then putting this in more
mathematical language:

"A splice is palindromic if and ony if it has just one odd lead end group."

This also works for 6-bell splices. There are only four of them, all
palindromic, so can be easily republished:  AABFB  ABAEE  AEFFE   BBFEF

However, this does not work for Royal. Some splices obeying the above
condition are palindromic and some are not. ABDFFDBAC is whilst ABFDFBDAC is
not.

Would I be right in guessing that the condition is true for Maximus, 
Fourteen and Eighteen but not for Sixteen?

Best wishes
Robin







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