and into wrote:I've read your response a few times Hurkyl and I confess I'm not sure exactly what your point is. Yes, you make decisions based on the information you have, but because the information you have is not perfect, you cannot always be 100% sure you are making the right choice. Coming up with a situation in which there is obviously a correct answer (orc priest in view when you have 1 HP and a scroll of blinking—and presumably a way to use the ?blinking such that you break LOS) really is neither here nor there. In any practical instance where such a thing happened there were probably several turns before that point when the situation was not so dire, and also not so clear cut in terms of what you next action should (really, needs to) be.
The point of the example is to clearly demonstrate the general principle that there can be an obviously best response -- and we can be 100% certain* that it
is the best response -- in the face of imperfect information.
Even when that response would be obviously wrong if we had perfect information (the priest's HP, your next damage roll).
Maybe a completely unrelated example would be useful: you're playing blackjack with a freshly shuffled deck, and you're dealt a total of 13 and the dealer has a 6 up. You have imperfect information -- you have no idea what the next card in the deck is or what the dealer's hole card is. However, you still have a clear best response: you stand. That response might cost you the hand, but it's much more likely to win you the hand than any other action.
You can do that with combat in crawl too. If I wanted to, it would be relatively straightforward to write a short program where I feed in my weapon, skills, and stats and how many squares are between us when the engagement properly starts, and it tells me exactly how much HP I should have if I want a 99% chance of killing the orc priest before it kills me. Or any other number of more sophisticated things; e.g. if I feed in how much I value killing the priest relative to how much I value a scroll of blinking, it could tell me how much HP I should have before engaging the priest is the
best response given my values.
The interesting decision is how much I should value killing the priest in regards to my consumables or my likelihood of surviving the conflict. But for any particular choice of those those values, there
is a clear best response to encountering an orc priest (I mean doing so normally, not in the extreme example I mentioned earlier).
*: For the hypothetical, I am assuming all other information is neutral; e.g. the place to blink to is very likely to be safe, as opposed to something I think is probably in LOS of a centaur I saw wandering around