SpiritSentient Versus Kobe Bryant

There was a recent article on the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell that left a deep, strong and I would imagine lasting impression on me.

He got me thinking about the odds against success. If you are a new author, you can simply count the number of books that exist for sale at your nearest bookstore. A fighter? Good luck at the UFC, if you can even get in. You might have better luck getting a black belt in Karate.

In his article, Malcolm exposes the strategies that the underdog has used to consistently dominate their superior opponents. In life, there are always situations where we are the underdog.

Example 1:

A basketball player by the name of Pitino sat on the bench and saw his team, an all star team that by all statistics and logic should have completely creamed their opponents, suffering a humiliating defeat by some rough types from the poor areas of Brooklyn. The Brooklyn team was coached to attack, non-stop, a full-court press, at all times. They had an unorthodox strategy of relentlessly attacking the other teams all-star player with players that would simply foul themselves out. It didn’t matter, they won by over 8 points in the end, a solid win.

Effort triumphing over ability. Pitino used this strategy later on as a coach and went on to win championships. His team practiced everyday for 2 hours straight, where the players were moving almost 98% of the time, with almost no talking. The only corrections given by the coaches lasted only 7 seconds so their heart rate never rested.

His teams, rare for a coach of his skill, never had any players who went on to be an all-star on the professional level (only one: Antoine Walker).

Lesson 1:

What’s an “ideal” basketball team? A bunch of players who perform using good skill, coordination and strategy.

However, when an audacious foreign party or roughnecks from New York or the Bronx uses effort over ability, the game simply goes crazy, everything is unknown and nothing is predictable. A mix of odd plays and random limbs moving about have otherwise professional players losing their focus and precision to play their normal strong and steady game.

Effort + unpredictable force + a strong desire = results

Example 2:

A computer scientist from Stanford University, Doug Lenat entered a war simulation competition. People who had studied war strategies all their lives, reading up and understanding things like how Waterloo tricked Napoleon; all types of these kinds with a wealth of conventional strategy knowledge from growing up playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons were the opponents. All the competitors were completely and easily destroyed by the the program Lenat created called Eurisko.

The rules of the tournament were hundreds of pages long, and all the players were told to create their own fleet of battleships with an imaginary trillion dollars.

Eurisko did not know any strategies before hand and came up with a strategy unheard of: buying as many small yet weak boats as it possibly could, and sank its own boats the minute they got damaged for mobility purposes. It didn’t matter if it’s opponents had superior defense and a well balanced and mixed army, the unconventional pressing style of attack easily defeated all its competitors and won the tournament.

Lesson 2:

When someone is an outsider and new, or an underdog, they have the advantage of not knowing the “regular ways of playing”. Eurisko was an underdog, it didn’t have any pre-formulated ideas programmed into it to find out what was the “best one logically”. It was able to create an formula that was socially horrifying, completely challenging how battles were supposed to be fought.

Conventional methods towards victory are a very, very incomplete estimate of all the best ways that exists to win.