RobertJasiek wrote:Actually, you introduced 'profit value' for one move's profit and 'net profit' for the alternating difference of a sequence's profit values quite some time ago, although you did not provide such definitions explicitly, AFAIK. I have found these terms very useful when expressing the change from a starting count to a follower's count.
Well, your memory is better than mine on that score.

(Edit: I did a search here and did not find that I used it here.) Possibly that happened on rec.games.go or, perhaps more likely, in the lost archives of Godiscussions before 2010. Back in the 1990s I pushed for Western players to learn and use miai values for moves instead of deiri values, in an attempt to help clarify evaluation. I seem to have caused more confusion, however. John Fairbairn has pointed out that the term,
deiri in accounting refers to profit and loss. It could be that I tried the term,
profit value, as an English equivalent to miai value. That seems to be how you are using the term. But eventually I decided to simply use the term,
gain, despite some ambiguity. Unless you get really technical, you don't have to distinguish between the difference in counts and the difference in games. Here I was getting really technical, because I wanted to show that sente in the technical sense can gain something, just not points.
There seems to be no consensus yet on whether 'gain' might occur as another term. I hope that not because profit and gain are so similar to create confusion that is better avoided.
Yes, I see other people using "miai value", but neither "profit value" nor "gain" seems to have generally caught on yet.