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Xanatos Speed Chess: Difference between revisions
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** With an occasional meteor or other massive natural disaster as a [[Spanner in the Works]].
* [[American Civil War]] general, George B. McClellan. He believed that victory went to the commander who outsmarted his enemy. McClellan was always trying to decide what old Lee would have done and then come up with a really elaborate counterstrike that would wreck his plans. But his methods led to a loss as to what the ''objective'' was, leading him to pass up opportunities where all that was needed was a direct attack following a plan no more complicated than "keep shooting until the other side is all dead".
* The theory of [https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility antifragility] (concept even more general than reliability) points to opportunistic adaptation as part of survival strategy: to maximize a system's viability in real conditions (where random disturbances happen all the time), you need to minimize potentially fatal outcomes ''and'' optimize the entire the function of "gain-pain". The latter in turn involves both minimizing losses from bad luck events ''and'' maximizing opportunistic gain from good luck events, if only because winning some more resources usually allows to amortise some more damage from setbacks (if you already have consumed more than enough of nutrients, you can go hungry a bit longer, and the better time you make in the racing proper, the more time you can afford to lose on pit stops)... as long as a single event doesn't cause game over all by itself.
** E.g. a kingdom is ''fragile'' if per old song it can be lost due to a single horseshoe thrown. But we can move into the opposite direction. An ''anti-fragile'' kingdom would be resistant to such failures on many levels: motivate and select more reliable smiths to work for the cavalry and courier corps (well-paid jobs), and likewise good riders for the courier corps (horse racing is a thing), have more horses fit for the couriers (use a good season to breed and feed ''more'' horses, pay attention to horse breeding <ref>we want more ''fast'' horses</ref>) and send redundant messengers<ref>and make sure horses are available to quickly remount cavalry while we're at it</ref>, find and deploy whatever alternative methods of battlefield communication are available, have at least some reserves on hand<ref>among the other things, reserves increase both ability to resist ''bad luck'' (compensate for faltering units or unexpected enemy tactics) and ability to invest in ''good luck'' (bolster a successful attack or secure a new position) without being restricted by immediate trade-offs</ref>, etc. But pasture productivity and hay yield depend on random weather, animal husbandry optimizes for performance from input of random combinations of random mutations, qualities of smith apprentices are also somewhat random and need vetting via competition, craft methods (down to smithy layouts) are subject to a form of evolution... thus most of these proactive measures boil down to "exploit random openings better, and use them to guard against risks and losses from inevitable random setbacks".
{{reflist}}
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