Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
This is one of those posts where I just expound on a weird thought-experiment I had a while ago: I had this one while I was watching some track-and-field tournament playing on television in a pub last spring. Imagine a javelin-throwing tournament. Now I'm not actually really sure of the standard rules in actual javelin competitions (I wasn't really paying much attention to the game), but in my version everyone just gets one throw and whoever throws their javelin the furthest wins. At what moment in time would the game be "won"? I feel like there a few fields of thought here. The most obvious would be the moment when the final player's javelin lands. At that point all the possible influences are over, and the winner is unchangeable. However, the throw still needs to be measured by the umpires, if the top two throws are very close it might be impossible to tell without an exact measurement. So can you really say the game is "won" before the official measurements are in? Because in reality it is those measurements that are being ranked, not the perfectly-true distance thrown. The judges make their call on the winner based only on the measurements, and that relies on a perfect measuring stick, which can't exist. Obviously the true distance thrown is very close to the measured distance, but there will always be error there. So I'd say within the real-life constraints of the game, nobody has "won" until the official measurements have been taken. I call this theory "Victory at Measurement".
However, one could instead divorce the "true winner" from the "official winner". Say the top two throws have mere micrometres between them: no measuring stick (available to your average track-and-field adjudicator) would be able to differentiate them. But since distance is a non-discrete, continuous measurement, there is a "true winner", just no one will ever know who it was. So in terms of the "spirit" of the game, the true winner is more important than the official winner. Therefore we must return to the original proposition of the game being "won" at the moment the final player's javelin lands, or "Victory at Impact". Or do we?
Proposition three: victory at release. As a javelin thrower throws a javelin, after the moment at which he releases the javelin from his grip, he has no control over the flight of the projectile. In a perfect setting the spear would follow a perfect ballistic trajectory, governed only by momentum and gravity. However on Earth we also must factor in friction from the atmosphere, which itself has a variety of variables. The aerodynamics of the throw: a javelin thrown point forward receives less friction than one thrown broadside-to. Moment of inertia (that is the resistance to angular acceleration): which can be increased by adding spin to a throw, and which will prevent an undesirable rotation mid-air. The atmospheric conditions: air pressure, humidity level, temperature, pitch altitude; all of these things (and more) each have microscopic effects on the final distance. Even a tiny gust of wind caused by the Butterfly-Effect initiated by some random quantum fluctuation (of a butterfly for that matter) will have an influence. All of these factors add up to create an unknowable effect on the flight of the javelin, and therefore it would be impossible to predict the exact distance it will land at the moment of release for a human. However you could describe it as "already decided" in that moment: no further interaction to the system from humans will occur, and therefore the result is entirely deterministic (maybe), or at the least there is no more influence from the humans being tested. Therefore the winner is decided at the moment of release of the final javelin throw: "Victory at Release".
But anyone who has watched a game like this before will know that often its none of these moments at which victory is proclaimed. In a competition with clear favourites, once the scores are in for those who are deemed to be "potential winners", victory is all but foregone. Obviously this isn't a real conclusion: everyone understands that an outlier could steal victory at the eleventh hour. For instance in Chess, many a game doesn't actually end in a check/stale mate, but rather surrender. The loser understands that he could technically still win, but his odds are so diminished that it is not worth fighting for any longer. Its harder to translate into javelin, but let's say a charity javelin game has the Olympic record holder throw a legendary world record throw, and only has a schoolgirl from the local Guide Unit to go after him. The odds would so hugely be against her that the everyone would claim the game to be "won" already (except probably the schoolgirl's Mum). This, chance-based form of winning is "Victory at Overwhelming Odds".
Now lets look at it from a different angle. Maybe we can retrospectively assign a moment in time as the "moment of victory"? Once the throw which will go on to be the winning throw has been made (at whichever moment between measurement, impact or release you prefer), the "winning throw" has been made, even if nobody knows it yet. While the winner is hardly "decided" in that moment, you could claim it was when the game was "won", which was the original question. Now this line of reasoning opens up a Pandora's Box of deterministic nonsense. If the level of the players' training, skill and temperament are already set at the beginning of the game, you could say that its decided before it has even started. And as you deny the existence of the varying levels of free will entirely, the question rapidly starts folding in on itself. Was the game won at the moment the game's participants were selected (say this was done randomly)? Was the game won at the moment the winner first decided to become a javeliner? At the moment of their birth? Their conception? The beginning of the universe? Is everything just God playing dice? Well no it isn't. And even if it was it's meaningless to understand it that way and requires altering the definitions of a lot of words. Either way I'll lump these ideas into the broad category of "Victory Predetermined".
These forms of reasoning equate to the distinction made between Aristotle's two forms of reason: analytics a priori, and analytics a posteriori. "Victory Predetermined" relies on a wholly or partially deterministic universe: "a priori". "Victory at Measurement" is "a posteriori" and follows the empirical methodology of science. "Victory at Impact" is some form of a priori analysis of an a posteriori deduction. "Victory at Release" works on the same "a priori" deterministic understanding as "Victory Predetermined", but maintains humanity as a special case: something non-deterministic in a otherwise deterministic universe, akin to a Thomas Paine or Deistic worldview (which for me at least is surprisingly convincing in this case, whereas full "Victory Predetermined" reasoning is not). "Victory at Overwhelming Odds" is more of a redefinition of "victory" in hindsight, and can be matched up with any of the other options. However it can also be repurposed as an idea: we may deny human free-will to a partial extent, we are certainly influenced by deterministic and mechanical influences after all. And the moment at which the degree to which our free-will can no longer counteract the influence of deterministic factors is another "moment of victory". The Olympic thrower, for example, could easily throw a distance that the schoolgirl just physically cannot throw, no matter any bonuses she may get from her free-will. 1+ran(1-5) is always < 10 after all.
In the end I think its broadly meaningless to actually decide on a "true moment of victory" all of these moments are "true" under their own rules, and most are impossible to know by their very nature, but it was interesting to me to consider the nebulous and ill-defined cloud of meaning that we all implicitly understand to be held within a seemingly cut-and-dry definition like "winning a game".
