INBOX (noctium)

[hierophany]

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Comments

[hierophany]

Wanting to play baseball was the most controversial thing he ever did.

Who the fuck wants to play baseball. Playing baseball is the least interesting thing about baseball.

[freshprints]

What do you consider the most interesting thing about baseball?

[hierophany]

Modelling different possibilities. You can take the numbers from any given game and change any element and have a fairly accurate understanding of how the game would have gone, with that change. Then you can take those updated results and apply them to the entire league. To a player's lifetime performance. To a team's performance throughout its entire time in being. You can make one day in the 1940s slightly more windy and understand how that would change the entire selection of teams as we know them in the present.

It's the closest most people are ever going to get to knowing what it would be like to make one little change in the past and watch the results cascade outward.

[freshprints]

You make it sound similar to chess. I think I've heard the two compared before, actually. As sports go.

You're referencing the butterfly effect, aren't you? In chaos theory.

[hierophany]

Yes. There are few other places in real life where such meticulous records are kept and where the results of any possible change are so easily quantifiable.

Baseball provides an environment where you can choose to place the movement of a proverbial butterfly's wings at any given place and understand every change that would come about as a result. The actual sport is uninteresting in comparison.

[freshprints]

...

I like to replay chess games. Meticulous records are kept of every move from every game, so any game can be reproduced in its entirety by anyone with access to those move lists.

Russian Champion Boris Spassky blundered on move nineteen of game eight in the chess world championships of 1972. It's recorded in history forever as the reason he lost that game of the match. One single mistaken move of a pawn.

[hierophany]

Chess is fascinating in that respect. For nearly every set of positions on the board there is a truly correct play. If you want a game where you can model any change perfectly, that would be it.

I've never been able to make it keep my interest, I admit. I think perhaps because of that perfection. The only places you'll ever find to change are human errors. You don't have a pawn with an old leg injury that the cold weather exacerbates. A knight who lost his horse in the last battle, riding one who doesn't trust him so completely.

The most interesting thing you could do in chess is to model a complete beginner playing a master.

[freshprints]

It's one of the only games that allows both the players and the observers to "predict the future". Because of the existence of correct play, it's possible to already know move sixty-four when the game has only advanced as far as move thirty-six.

What's truly fascinating about it, though, is how all of that predictive quality relies on assumptions of correctness. Skilled players approach uniformity as they all simultaneously pursue the perfect answer.

In other words, the complete beginner might actually stand a chance against the master. The master far outclasses the beginner in skill. But the novice has the advantage of creativity.

[hierophany]

Precisely. If the only butterflies there are are human error, then you want someone making as many errors as possible if you want to change anything. They'll still lose most games. Sometimes the errors they make will be the really stupid kind of errors.

But it'll become possible for them to win. A beginner would win a tiny percentage of games against a master. A skilled player playing a master would win none.

Boris Spassky lost because he put one pawn in the wrong place. It wasn't because it was in the wrong place. It was because it was only one.

[freshprints]

It could also be said that the beginner isn't skilled enough to realize his errors are errors. He doesn't treat them as mistakes the way that the skilled players do. There's a psychological component involved.