The difference is simple: the TARGET type nonsense will take results and try to infer that some specific event occured, while a new advantage play will give an actual prediction.
I once wrote Arnold a letter on what it would take to turn TARGET into a real system; that there would have to be some system for detecting some bias by which you could extrapolate valid predictions. Perhaps Arnold still has it somewhere? IMHO it is needed now more than ever.
The biggest near miss is to compare the Boris software system. It was a very good forensic tool for taking deck orders and decoding the shuffle sequences that produced that order from the discarded cards. But it was used instead as a predictive tool that claimed that deck orders indicated that some shuffle procedures would then always occur.
Compare that with the very good posts, put up here and on the CCC on yahoo.com, by alienated. He posted on how a perfect series of riffles would take adjacent discards and would place them a specific number of cards appart, such that by controling the number of spots in total, when the presence of such a group was detected, a specific hand could be brought back to a desired player. That instead involved specific predictions.
So take my advice and ask, as any good skeptical consumer of information should, when confronted with any new advantage play claim: Where's the Prediction?
