Typically great article by Malcolm Gladwell in this month's New Yorker, this time about how underdogs can triumph (quite often) by defying the rules and conventions of any field and attacking with intelligence and audacity. And effort. The main thrust of the piece is about a 12 y/o girls basketball team who succeeded wildly beyond their talents simply by running a full court press and working their tails off. There are a lot of other examples woven in from warfare and sports, and one I found most amusing; from some sort of naval military board game simulation.
In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. “Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off,” Lenat said. “The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger.”
Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. “The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility,” Lenat said. “They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn’t matter, because we had so many.” Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.
The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet “agility.” Eurisko went back to work. “What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again,” Lenat said. Eurisko won again.
...“In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet,” Lenat said. “It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out.”
Which is, of course, how it usually goes in life. Underdogs can defy convention and win, once in a while. Their success will invariably result in the traditional power structure changing the rules to try and thwart them, and if that doesn't work the powers that be simply ban the upstart tactics. Easier to legislate than evolve. They'd rather die doing what they know than adapt to change.
That's somewhat understandable in the example I quoted. After all, they're just a bunch of grown up D&D playing mil-nerd guys who want to wear admiral hats in their simulated navy, with battleships and destroyers and all the traditional pretend pomp and circumstance. They don't want to think outside the box, or deal with radical strategies. It's a hobby and a way for a small, self-selected group to have fun. It's less defensible as a practice/strategy/hobby when it's real life, and countries or companies are dying thanks to the hidebound idiocy of their leadership. And yet it's happened countless times in history, past, present, and future.
Labels: psychology
