Principles, Models, and Algorithms

 

As you might recall, I have slowly been reading C. Thi Nguyen's The Score, and, as I mentioned before, he talks quite a lot about games and hobbies, as distinct from the rules which tend to bind our lives, both personal and in our employment. It is, of course, the first I wish to focus on here; the second is rather scary.

One distinction we can make to understand how rules apply is to consider whether a rule is mechanical or permits judgment. For example, I could lead you to a crowded room and tell you to count all the mature people. You can execute this however you wish. You might go and talk to each individual in the room, ask them questions, and then, once you have done that, determine who is mature from their answers, and who is not. That is one rule and its application for sorting the people. It takes human judgment to achieve.

Another is simply to list their ages and apply a rule that states that all persons over the age of eighteen are mature. This is, of course, a lot faster to apply. We only need to answer one question for each individual, and the sorting is a lot faster. Of course, we may find that our mechanical rule fails for some individuals. Certain current politicians might, for example, pass the over-eighteen test but, in fact, be exposed as immature. The mechanical rule removes any human judgment from its application.

This leads to a sort of hierarchy of rules, from a principle to an algorithm. A principle is a general, abstract statement of what to do. It is to be applied with skill, judgment, and care. Experience helps, but we also have to bear in mind that the rule will not always work. In wargaming, we can set up a wargame in which both sides aim to win. So the principle is ‘win the battle’. But, as we know, in real life as in wargaming, winning is not necessarily the only aim. To adjust that, of course, we either fight campaigns or, more normally, set up scenarios, where the principle becomes ‘delay the enemy for 10 moves’ or ‘escort the wagon train across the table.’ This opens a wide variety of principles, open to the judgment of the wargamers. A principle, then, is open to judgment, discretion, and care.

A model is a sort of exemplar, such as a role model. A model is not mechanical, but a complicated and open-ended process. For example, we model sub-atomic particles, such as electrons, as both waves and particles. This leads the student to often question whether an electron is a particle or a wave. The real answer is that they are neither. Electrons are electrons; what changes is how we model them.

In wargame rules, there are often underlying models. We have models for artillery fire, musketry, hand-to-hand fighting, morale, and so on. Notice that what I am talking about here is not how the model is applied, but the underlying model of how we conceptualise what is going on. Thus, in my rules, I have a specific model for what happens when troops are skirmishing. I envisage a core group of warriors, with smaller details dashing out, throwing their javelins (or whatever), and dashing back to the safety of the bigger group. This seems to be how much skirmishing happened in the ancient and early modern worlds, at least in my view.

With the model in mind, I can try to work out what happens when specific situations arise. Thus, for example, when skirmishers come into conflict with formed firepower infantry, what happens? The main body of the skirmishers is too far away to be in range of the bows or muskets of the formed foot. But we also know from history that formed firepower troops tend to drive off lighter forces. Thus, in my rules, the formed troops being attacked by skirmishers get the chance to shoot back. In the model, of course, they are shooting at the small groups, disrupting them, and forcing the skirmishers to fall back, or at least cease and desist being annoying.

Finally, we arrive at the lowest level, that of application. What we have here are mechanical rules, which are to be applied without any discretion or judgment. Our rule for sorting mature from immature people by age is like this. We just sort them without considering the older than their years sixteen-year-old, or the feckless 79-year-old. It is this concept of a rule we find in our rule books, often, it seems, without much of the underlying principles and models being made explicit.

So, in my case of skirmishers against formed foot, we measure the ranges, look up the factors, and roll dice, adding and subtracting and comparing until we get a result. The result is looked up in a table and is applied to the game. This, once we agree on the distances and dice rolled, is mechanical. It might give unusual results, based on the dice rolling and factors, but the application requires no judgment on our part, and there is no room for discretion. Indeed, application of judgment and discretion might be referred to as cheating, although that is not necessarily the case.

The whole point of mechanical algorithms is that they can be implemented by anyone. This is, of course, exactly what we need in our rule sets. Statements in rules which say ‘if the two bases are around a couple of inches or so away from each other, you might want to do this, or you could do that…’ are useless to us. There is no significant skill, judgment, or discretion allowed in mechanical rule application.

On the other hand, it could be that without appreciating why the rules are a certain way, we miss something. And it also seems to be the case that only ever setting up wargames where the principle is to defeat the enemy becomes a bit boring. The rules executed to achieve our aims might be mechanical, the models we use might (or might not) represent the real world well. But when we pull back to the level of the principles of wargaming, we encounter a much more human, vague, ill-defined world where we have to decide what our aims might be.