It certainly looks like gobbledygook when you see the equation on a white board.
And even a wet weekend in Waitahuna would not be long enough to come to terms with all the intricacies of the Duckworth-Lewis method.
But the theory is not that difficult to understand at all - simple, even.
Well, simple if you are using one of those free online calculators where all you have to do is pop a few digits in the right boxes and, hey presto, the magic numbers appear.
Maths aside, after several efforts to get to grips with the system, there has been a bit of a breakthrough. All it took was an analogy.
According to Professor Richard Barker, the head of the department of mathematics and statistics at the University of Otago, the Duckworth-Lewis method works like compound interest, only in reverse.
The model is based on diminishing resources. Each team's resources are its wickets in hand and the number of overs available. The ability to score runs depends on the combination of those two resources and it is that relationship which the Duckworth-Lewis method exploits.
"It is a simple mathematical model and, like all models, it is not reality but an abstraction of reality," Barker said.
"The question isn't whether the calculation is exactly right, it is a question of whether it is close enough for everybody to go away happy - most importantly, the spectators."
Therein lies the problem. The general public does not get it.
Duckworth-Lewis is often informally criticised as being too complex.
Staring at the equation on the board once again, it is hard to disagree. But the system Frank Duckworth and Tony Lewis devised is streets ahead of some of the previous methods which had been used.
Of all the various systems, it seems to deliver the fairest result. And a fair result is one which gives both teams the same chance of winning after the interruption as they had before the interruption.
"One of the keys of the Duckworth-Lewis is they recognise that the balls remaining isn't the only resource you have to consider.
"If you scale the target back in proportion to the balls lost, that is not going to lead to a fair outcome because there is no adjustment made for the number of wickets lost."
It was a situation not too dissimilar which gave Duckworth the idea in the first place. He was listening to a broadcast of the 1992 World Cup semifinal debacle between South Africa and England.
South Africa needed 22 runs from 13 balls when a short rain delay left the Proteas apparently needing 22 runs from one delivery (they actually needed 21 runs from one delivery but a mistake was made).
He heard Christopher Martin-Jenkins saying surely someone could come up with a better system.
It was a lightbulb moment, as they say.
The Duckworth-Lewis method made its debut in the summer of 1996-97 but was not formally adopted by the ICC until 2001.
Had it been used in the 1992 semifinal, South Africa would have needed four runs to tie and five runs to win.
So how does it work? The system uses statistical information and historical data, which is regularly reviewed, to give the average amount of runs scored given the number of wickets and number of balls remaining.
That information is tabulated and used to calculate the percentage of resources lost when there is a stoppage in play.
Target scores are then scaled appropriately.
If team one, for example, scored 250 runs from 50 overs and team two was 199 for five after 40 overs when play was abandoned, team two would win by 18 runs.
Why? Well, team two had 27.5% of its resources remaining when the game was called off. That means team two used 72.5% of its resources, and 72.5% of 250 is 181.25. It exceeded the the Duckworth-Lewis adjusted target by 17.75 runs and is declared the winner by 18 runs.
Simple, see? Of course, only God knows whether team two would have gone on to win the game had the weather not intervened.
Perhaps the best measure of the system's fairness is the fact the proportion of matches won by the team batting first is about the same for uninterrupted and interrupted matches.
