Go uses a 19 by 19 Grid, 181 black stones and 180 white stones. While the average number of legal moves in chess at any point is 37, in Go it's between 150 and 250 and rarely falls below 50. The most powerful computer around today would require 5 days to calculate all possible combinations of the next 8 moves (5.12 x 10²⁰ combinations). While computers can defeat the best human players, in Go they only manage an intermediate amateur level. The different values of chess pieces make it easier to calculate position, in Go it is far more difficult; the placement of one stone early in the game has an impact on play 100s of moves later. Chess is complicated, Go is complex and the differences give us a way of understanding the different strategies on of robustness and resilience which I raised yesterday.
The basic principle of Robustness is to prevent failure. With resilience we assume that failure is more probable and aim to recover fast. Remember this is not an either/or, its a both/and. Having said that two things are important:
- Focusing on robustness may make us over confident that we can avoid failure and thus reduce our resilience;
- As failure becomes increasingly likely then triggering it early may reduce the negative impact of a later and potentially catastrophic failure;
- If the nature of the system is such that failure is going to happen, moving in early and recovering fast will have competitive advantage.
Resilience does not imply fatalism, we need to do our best to understand the emerging possibilities of the present. Prediction is difficult or impossible to achieve in a complex system but anticipatory awareness should be mandated. So what can we do?
- Shifting from big picture scenarios created by specialists to micro-scenarioes generated by large volumes of players. I posted about this at length some time ago so I will not repeat myself here.
- Using that work to focus on recording and monitoring for outlier events. Gaussian approaches seek to eliminate outliers, pareto distributions take them into account. Outliers are both risk and opportunity.
- If mass participation in creation of micro scenarios is established, then mass participation in the generation of multiple micro-perspectives can be activated during the build up to, and the recovery from a crisis.
- Small units with distributed command and control are both handle novelty better than large hierarchical organisations. Putting crews into place is one way to achieve this. Role based entities not depending on prior knowledge the individual can handle sustained pressure better than hierarchies. They are also more resilient (sic) to loss of personnel.
- Distributed technology and other support to operational units is another obvious change. The BBC, trying to recover back episodes of Doctor Who (they originally overwrote tapes as they were expensive), suddenly discovered that people who have illegally pirated tapes of back episodes became a source of recovery. Over structured and constrained systems are not resilience, allowing some degree of freedom and redundancy increases overall resilience.
- It's more important to understand that sudden change is likely than it is to predict the nature of that sudden change. It's also easier. Our use of fitness landscapes discussed in the above referenced post on scenario planning is one way to achieve this.
- The past can inform the future. Gathering large volumes of experiences, both direct and indirect, from previous disasters encountered and avoided by the organisation and by other organisations, all creates a knowledge database that allows the rapid recall of fragmented knowledge from multiple events that we can conceptually blend with our current experiences of failures to plot a way forward. In Iraq it was platoon commanders blogging that worked, not doctrine. A modern system combining micro-scenarios of possible futures and the micro-narratives of past experience gives us a knowledge based strategy for uncertainty that reflects the naturally evolved capabilities of humans.
The above list assumes a degree of prior knowledge of Cognitive Edge methods and approaches, but I wanted to keep it short. I also hope the link to Go is fairly self-evident. If it isn't then remember that in go all the pieces have the same value, and the context of their position is more important than their nature.
Comments (5)
Very interesting to compare Go with Chess, but I am not sure I agree with Chess being complicated and Go complex. I was a tournament chess player myself and have played Go as well. In chess too, context matters and the relative values of pieces change as the play moves forward and situations change. Pawns can become queens, but a queen in a certain position may be worth less than a knight. NUmber of possible moves goes up and down as play progresses. A choice made in the beginning -a certain opening - will impact middle or end game, but the impact is unpredictable. Because chess is payed by humans - and therefore looking at the game without the human interaction element is not helpful, unless it is played against a computer or between computers, it creates even more unpredictability, and situations may be so complex that what is right, can only be determined in hindsight due to bounded rationality, pressure of time (when a chess clock is used) etc. While there are more pieces for Go and more fields, it may very well be that both are complex games albeit very different games.
Regarding point 7 I associate this with TRIZ and particularly their approach to Failure, i.e. Anticipatory Failure Determination (AFD), Failure analysis and Failure prediction, all based on a database in which abstract rules that have emerged from practice can be used to understand, predict and analyze failures. The basic idea is to use rules for invention to make the failure happen. For more of this see Ideation International that I discussed in a CE blog article http://bit.ly/3WlmVN. They have also done interesting work called Directed Evolution which process has some similarities with Future backwards.
This topic of resilience vs robustness, as Dave and others have suggested, is of great importance as executives around the world mistakenly assume that one of their goals in the current economic downturn is to cut cost that often results in letting people go. This reduces their resilience to recover from what has become an increasingly volatile world, where resilience matters more. See also my CE blog article http://bit.ly/jNgTL on "Do executives really want cost reduction?" If they would stay focused on the notion of value creation, they would examine the context and realize that resilience is now a key success factor. This should make them think twice if not more before they lay off people, thereby stripping the recovery potential of their organization.
Posted by Boudewijn Bertsch | August 31, 2009 3:23 PM
Posted on August 31, 2009 15:23
a little more about GO would be useful
rather than using it as mind-candy
i wonder if we can play a game
and while playing
discuss things?
might be useful form of engagement
since i find that current forms of discussion
forums and emails and even in-person-meetings
do not lend themselves well to system comparisons...
be well!
Posted by happyseaurchin | August 31, 2009 4:28 PM
Posted on August 31, 2009 16:28
Chess is build on a hierarchical organization - if you loose the king, you have lost the game.
Go is much more flexible, you can choose one of your stones to be the most valuable and spend quite a lot of effort on this, next moment you loose it and suddenly it becomes part of your new strategy, that you have sacrificed your "king".
This flexibility is complex - the old fashion KIng is a King is complicated.
So I agree with Dave in his analyze.
Posted by Svend-Erik Engh | August 31, 2009 5:57 PM
Posted on August 31, 2009 17:57
As a Go player myself for many years I'm excited to see you know of the game David. I also love the idea of using it to explain complexity and since Chess can be solved (ie: every solution mapped like Checkers already has) I too would call it complicated rather than complex.
One may think you can do the same with Go, however not only are their more permutations possible on the Go board than there are stars in the universe (apparently) the complex interactions of the stones mean that loops appear such that no single move is a guarantee of success. Winning is a matter of points gained from territory and prisoners which has the effect of seperating the moves from the score by one degree.
happyseaurchin suggests playing a game and discussing it. I like the idea and extend the offer to all in Melbourne, Australia who would like to give it a Go. Maybe we could dedicate a night at KMLF to it? Hmmmm.
Thanks Dave!
Posted by Stuart French | September 2, 2009 9:38 AM
Posted on September 2, 2009 09:38
It has taken a while to organise, however for those who were interested I will be running an introduction and discussion of complexity using Go at the January 27th KMLF in Melbourne, Australia.
Should be a fun night with Go boards and programs if there are too many people. Hopefully you will walk away with a grasp of why Complicated and Complex are different and require different approaches for success.
Posted by Stuart French | January 9, 2010 1:36 PM
Posted on January 9, 2010 13:36