Yes, this makes sense. But the reason that I am asking this is not for an analysis of the posted position. It is to get some examples of analysis. After I asked for this, I was told that it is too difficult without giving the rest of the board position. So I replied to say that the board was empty just to do that. I don't care what the position is - I just wanted an analysis.

Bill illustrated some interesting techniques with some kind of game tree, which is really exactly what I was looking for - an example of how some of this is done. The senseis pages have some additional information, too, now that I look at it.

So already, the responses to this thread have been useful to me.

My last set of questions are inquiries on the explanation that Bill already gave - which was already a good explanation.

It's nice to have a bunch of knowledgeable folks around here regarding this type of stuff, which is why I am eager to ask more questions about the information that's been presented.

My original question was probably too open-ended, I know. If I knew more about this topic, perhaps I could have presented a more focused question to begin with.

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be immersed

Sorry for answering the wrong questions! There are a lot of question marks in this thread, and a lot of them involve sentence fragments that refer to a dialogue between you and Bill which probably makes more sense to you two than to me. But to answer one question you seemed to have -

Sente is used in different senses. (Same for gote.) We use it to mean "B played there and W replied," and also "B played there and W's best move was to reply," and finally "if B's best move were to play there, W's best move would be to reply." The first sense doesn't imply anything at all about the whole-board situation or the global temperature. The second sense requires us to know the whole-board situation, so we can compare W's best move elsewhere to B's local follow-up. The third sense doesn't require us to know anything about the rest of the board at any given time - it just requires that assume that when B plays , there are no bigger moves elsewhere.

The third sense is generally the most useful for counting problems. When we say "A is B's sente," or "A will become B's sente in yose," or "B has the privilege of playing A", we mean that the follow-up is bigger than the original move, so if A1 is the biggest move on the board, A2 will definitely be the biggest move on the board. This gives B a window in which he can play A in sente, but W will have to take gote to play the same point. By assuming that everyone will get their own sente points, you simplify the board a lot. (B normally doesn't care if W takes gote to take away B's sente, since B can expect to get an equally large gote move elsewhere in exchange.)

This sense of sente ("B's sente," "W's sente", "gote for both", "double sente") does require you to know the size of the follow-ups for both sides in the local situation, but it doesn't require you to know anything about the global temperature. If B waits until the temperature is really low and suddenly W is able to play a move, in sente, which had been B's privilege, that's bad play by B, but it doesn't affect the analysis of the position.