Hi everyone. This is my first post to this forum, when I watched the above clip and saw Thornten trying to defend his definition of aliveness by using the example of a chess game I decided to write this. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it. The references used are listed at the end of the text.
Watching the mentioned clip shows Thorton claiming that: 1) "skill which you can apply in a fight is the difference between alive and dead training" and; 2) "if you don’t understand aliveness no matter what you train in you're not going to be able to fight". With all due respect to Matt, and the fact that I agree with the general point he is trying to make, he must concede that whenever someone, somewhere is fighting someone else (either in aggression or defence),the victor, or mere survivor, of such unfortunate events typically has never been to a SBG. His / her combative behaviour is concerned with survival. Thornton's insistence on placing the, poorly defined, buzzword aliveness at the root of everything he does, reduces much of what he says to the old "my style is better than your style" hubris. While statement 1) above cannot really be argued against; statement 2) assumes too much and should really be written as follows "if you don’t understand aliveness no matter what you train in you're not going to be able to fight "[AGAINST A TRAINED OPPONET, OF EQUAL OR HIGHER SKILL].
When fighting some one of lesser skill, logic would indicate that aliveness is proportionately less important as the skill level of the assailant drops. Hocheim has stated this over and over. He has also correctly stated that the answer to dealing with the trained opponent of equal or higher skill, does not rest on training with more and more resistance (which beyond a certain level becomes first sportive, then farcical), but rather in finding ways to reduce the advantage which superior skill brings to the table (diminished fighter theory).This distinction is crucial in showing part of the reason why SBG philosophy is "sport based" and why they criticise everyone who doesn’t do things exactly as they do.
This sportive training philosophy can only take users so far because in reducing the complexity of certain issues, reframing them in a manner that can be addressed in the ring, by not addressing the whole picture (psychological and strategic aspects of combat etc). This outlook conditions users to regard everything else in reference to the sportive model. This is SBG’s own "meaningless pattern". A very clear example of this can be seen in the clip when Thornton decides to use chess as illustrative of his definition of aliveness.
Thornton probably doesn't recall that the computer system dubbed "Deep Blue" was the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion (Garry Kasparov) under regular time controls. This first win occurred on February 10, 1996, and Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1996, Game 1 is a famous chess game. However, Kasparov won 3 games and drew 2 of the following games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2. The match concluded on February 17, 1996.
Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded (unofficially nicknamed "Deeper Blue") and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch 3.5–2.5, ending on May 11th. The final game is at Deep Blue - Kasparov, 1997, Game 6. Deep Blue thus became the first computer system to defeat a reigning world champion in a match under standard chess tournament time controls.
The system derives its playing strength mainly out of brute force computing power. It is a massively parallel, 30-node, RS/6000, SP-based computer system enhanced with 480 special purpose VLSI chess chips. Its chess playing program is written in C and ran under the AIX operating system. It was capable of evaluating 200,000,000 positions per second, twice as fast as the 1996 version. In June 1997, Deep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer, although this did not take into account Deep Blue's special-purpose hardware for chess.
The Deeper Blue chess computer which defeated Kasparov in 1997 could search to a depth of 12 ply. Good human chess players look roughly 10 ply ahead.
Here is where the plot thickens; at least as far as it concerns combat theory. Deep Blue's evaluation function was initially written in a generalized form, with many to-be-determined parameters (e.g. how important is a safe king position compared to a space advantage in the centre, etc.). The optimal values for these parameters were then determined by the system itself, by analyzing thousands of master games. The evaluation function had been split into 8,000 parts, many of them designed for special positions. In the opening book there were over 4,000 positions and 700,000 grandmaster games. The endgame database contained many six piece endgames and all five or fewer piece positions. Before the second match, the chess knowledge of the program was fine tuned by grandmaster Joel Benjamin. The opening library was provided by the grandmasters Miguel Illescas, John Fedorovich and Nick De Firmian.
Thornton may be unwilling to concede the point but this setup is the perfect example of alive (Grand Master Kasparov - a living thinking person) vs dead (Deep/er Blue - routines fixed by and defined by programmed code). What does this say about aliveness versus deadness? Not much because, as mentioned before, Thornton is applying concepts from one area onto another, where they do not translate well. The fact that both SBG MMA and chess are sports is irrelevant because Thorton’s definition of aliveness (Energy + Motion + Timing) is utterly irrelevant, both physically and conceptually.
The clincher is that after the lost match, Kasparov said that he sometimes saw deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, which he could not understand. He also suggested that humans may have helped the machine during the match. In part these allegations were correct. The rules provided for the developers to modify the program between games, an opportunity they took with abandon. The code was modified between games to understand Kasparov's play style better, allowing it to avoid a trap in the final game that the AI had fallen for twice before.
So how is this relevant to us as CQC practitioners? Consider the following examples while recognizing that combative behaviour is computed in much the same manner. Some animals are so fancy that they simulate a course of action before taking even a tentative first step. The chess master, who looks half-dozen moves ahead, is a prime example — as is the army general or poker player who thinks through bluff and counterbluff before acting. These are only extreme examples of how to make and compare alternative plans, but they illustrate the same sort of process that we all go through when simply contemplating the leftovers in the refrigerator, trying to figure out a combination that will avoid another trip to the grocery store.
Many animals look ahead in a limited way, predicting when winter is coming. But that requires only the simplest of hormonal mechanisms, not even a brain. It's a novel course of action, one that neither you nor any of your ancestors has done before, that is the difficult part.
If you have the time to grope around. A goal, and some feedback about progress, suffices for many novel situations. But if I have to pick up a cup of uncertain weight and bring it to my lips in less than a quarter of a second, feedback doesn't have time to help — and so I'll hit my nose if I haven't made the perfect plan in advance. The extensive planning needed for such ballistic movements as throwing, hammering, kicking, clubbing, and spitting has been very important in the ice age evolution of the human brain — and that we use the same neural machinery for planning what to speak next, or listen to music.
Creativity — indeed, the whole high end of intelligence and consciousness — involves playing mental games that shape up quality. Humans can simulate future courses of action and weed out the nonsense off-line.
By borrowing the mental structures for syntax to judge other combinations of possible actions, we can extend our plan-ahead abilities and our intelligence. To some extent, this is done by talking silently to ourselves, making narratives out of what might happen next, and then applying syntax-like rules of combination to rate a candidate scenario as dangerous nonsense, mere nonsense, possible, likely, or logical. But our intelligent guessing is not limited to language-like constructs; indeed, we may shout "Eureka!" when a set of mental relationships clicks into place, yet have trouble expressing this understanding verbally for weeks thereafter. What is it about human brains that allows us to be so good at guessing complicated relationships?
We create sequences when we speak a sentence that we've never spoken before or improvise at jazz or plan a career. We invent dance steps. Even as four-year-olds, we can play roles, achieving a level of abstraction (that "willing suspension of disbelief") not seen in even the smartest apes. Many of our beyond-the-apes behaviours involve novel strings of behaviours, often compounded: phonemes chunked into words, words into word phrases, and (as in this paragraph) word phrases into complicated sentences with nested ideas.
Rules for made-up games illustrate the memory aspect of this novelty: we must judge possible moves against serial-order rules, for example, in solitaire where you must alternate colours as you place cards in descending order. Preschool children will even make up such arbitrary rules, and then judge possible actions against them. We abandon many of the possible moves that we consider in a card game once we check them out against our serial-order memories of the rules. In shaping up a novel sentence to speak, we are checking our candidate word strings against over learned ordering rules that we call syntax and grammar. Our plan-ahead abilities gradually develop from childhood narratives and are a major foundation for ethical choices, as we imagine a course of action, imagine its effects on others, and decide not to do it.
That's the mentality that chess illustrates so well.
Taking all that has been said above, and wrapping up this far too long post, we can say that a) the video clip mentioned didn’t prove anything because it applied interesting concepts to area where they were of little use. Thornten hasn’t yet, a): provided a scientific (preferably psychological) explanation for why drills shouldn’t be used to perpetuate the learning of those skill sets through which these selfsame drills were created, and; b) how aliveness as an only training concept can ever hope to create a system of any subtlety, if it insists on ignoring those drills which have as primary purpose the transmission of previously learned and organized material.
REFERENCES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_bluehttp://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/learn/html/e.8.4.shtml
