When an architects is planning a house, he needs to know the precise dimensions of every room, the size and strength of the floor boards, the types of nails, etc. Once the house is built, the people planning to live there will need to know how many floors there are, how many rooms, etc. -- much more general information.

Which level of detail is more "basic"?

What some people don't realize is that in order to construct "total-dependant" basic strategy, the experts generally first build an extremely detailed composition-dependant basic strategy. It turns out it's easy to build BS that way, because there are precisely 3082 to create integral totals not exceeding 21, with no term greater than 10. 3082 is not a number of cases easily handled by humans, but it's very tractable for a computer. So it's a case of "the easiest (and most accurate) way to see the forest is to count all the trees!"

Theoreticians, such as Peter Griffin, considered total-dependant basic an approximation of composition-dependant basic, simply because that's the simplest way to look at it. Yet I doubt even Griffin had all the 3 card exceptions to t-d basic memorized, let alone the 4 card, 5 card ...

So what definition should we use? I say we leave it up to the architect. For example, should we consider a large walk-in closet a "room"? Different architects will operate under slightly different disciplines which the average home owner would consider trivial and arcane. If the architect says it's a room, let it be so. If you buy your home from another architect, use his terminology.

Naturally, we would like to be sure our architect is highly competent. But we recognize there are different schools of thought on the minutiae of house building.

Getting absolute agreement on the definition of "basic" will not advance the state of the art, because there will always be this dichotomy between what the architect must know, and what the user should know. Indeed, once a basic is built, after a period of time, the architect forgets much minutiae and simply becomes an above average user.

I'm confused by your statement: "What do we do about pairs? I think we need to accept that, for pairs, we shouldn't consider 6,6; 8,8; or 3,3 as "composition" of the hand. We need to specify, right at the outset, that these simply are not 12, or 16, or 6. So, pairs get a kind of exemption; they're "excused" from being "composition-dependent," in the strict sense of the term."

This only makes sense to me if I reword as follows: "What do we do about pairs? I think we need to accept that, for pairs, we should consider 6,6; 8,8; or 3,3 as "composition" of the hand. We need to specify, right at the outset, that these simply are not 12, or 16, or 6. So, pairs get a kind of exemption; they're "excused" from being "total-dependent," in the strict sense of the term." That's what 12, 16 and 6 are, no? They're totals.

Perhaps the simplest answer to your question: "just what would you want us researchers and authors to call `basic strategy'? " would be to call infinite deck basic the true "basic strategy," and list all composition-dependant departures as exceptions. Then we could have just ONE BS for any given set of rules, at least.

ETF