[piggity]

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I would have thought that working out the math and writing software to solve hands would work much better in an open public forum (much as sharing ideas in an academic setting is useful). But the catch seems to be the freerider problem whereby very few ppl are taking the time to work out the problems but any lurker gets to benefit from the results. It gets frustrating so eventually the ppl doing the hard work get sick of sharing results. Of course when they don't share the results with a sufficiently large audience, the results are less legitimate and lower quality.

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Yeah, I agree that open, collaborative efforts can be useful in general. The key distinction between discussing poker and working out more academic problems is that in the latter case, the work *is* the reward. That is, the reason to prove some obscure math conjecture would largely be for the sake of solving it. The incentives in the case of poker are obviously quite different, especially now that people can make real money playing LHE as a pro (vs say 7+ years ago when online multi-tabling was not an option).

I think an analogy can be made to pretty much any field where expertise results in money. In my line of work (quantitative finance), the people generally have backgrounds in math/physics/CS and are constantly working on interesting theoretical problems as they relate to the financial markets. But there is no way in hell we are sharing any of our results with anyone, since every other market participant is a competitor.

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Perhaps the solution is smaller working groups where if ppl don't pull their weight they get cut?

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That's essentially what a corporation is, and perhaps a natural result given the economic incentives. Like the secret Slovenian group that produced DERB. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]