From 878fd44753679395f701bc1c32602b0ffffa8814 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Zack M. Davis" Date: Mon, 5 Oct 2026 15:51:54 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] finish and publish "Dance, Dance" --- content/{drafts => 2026}/dance-dance.md | 31 +++++++------------------ 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+), 22 deletions(-) rename content/{drafts => 2026}/dance-dance.md (57%) diff --git a/content/drafts/dance-dance.md b/content/2026/dance-dance.md similarity index 57% rename from content/drafts/dance-dance.md rename to content/2026/dance-dance.md index 5a0c8bd..0e9a266 100644 --- a/content/drafts/dance-dance.md +++ b/content/2026/dance-dance.md @@ -1,6 +1,6 @@ Title: Dance, Dance -Date: 2026-10-05 -Status: draft +Date: 2026-10-05 15:55 +Status: published Category: psychology Tags: dance @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ The one that's captured my interest lately is the arrow-stomping game—known by The arrow-stomping game is notable for being trivial from the perspective of my before-time impulse to write a program for it. When programming (say) chess, the implementation of the rules of the game is quite different from the implementation of the tree search agent to play the game. Moreover, a chess program is an exercise in logic: the program need only represent the abstract structure of the game; robotics to move physical pieces on a physical board would be considered superfluous if they were considered at all. -The arrow-stomping game is just the opposite. If you implemented the game as a sequence of timers (expect Left in 2.0 seconds, Up in 2.25 seconds, Right in 2.5 seconds ...), then the natural implementation of an agent to play the game would be—the same sequence of timers (input Left in 2.0 seconds, _&c_.). Arrow-stomping is _only_ interesting as a robotics problem: the struggle of an embodied agent to convert visual cues to timing information and a motor plan to deliver a force to the appropriate panel or panels at the requested moment. It is thus particularly suited to the present end-time as an illustration of [Moravec's paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox). The games that endure are sports, which appear cognitively trivial only because the form of cognition demanded is more ancient than language, with the effect that we can't talk about it and the pretraining set (for all the vastness of webtext) doesn't cover it. +The arrow-stomping game is just the opposite. If you implemented the game as a sequence of timers (expect Left in 2.0 seconds, Up in 2.25 seconds, Right in 2.5 seconds ...), then the natural implementation of an agent to play the game would be—the same sequence of timers (input Left in 2.0 seconds, _&c_.). Arrow-stomping is _only_ interesting as a robotics problem: the struggle of an embodied agent to convert visual cues to timing information and a motor plan to deliver a force to the appropriate panel or panels at the requested moment. It is thus particularly suited to the present end-time as an illustration of [Moravec's paradox](https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/moravec-s-paradox). The games that endure are sports, which appear cognitively trivial only because the form of cognition demanded is more ancient than language, with the effect that we can't talk about it and the pretraining set (for all the vastness of webtext) doesn't cover it. A related way in which the pre-linguistic nature of arrow-stomping seems thematically suited to the present end-time has to do with how the process of learning it [casts doubt on the dream of an intelligence shaped like Reason itself](https://minihf.com/posts/2023-10-16-hermes-lecture-3-why-do-cognitive-scientists-hate-llms/). In the before-time, people thought that the end-times would be brought about by "good old fashioned" engineering turned on itself: [the code that writes the code that writes the code that ends the world](https://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Dec/i-want-to-be-the-one/). @@ -25,27 +25,14 @@ To be clear, that's still plausible as a theoretical possibility for a later end Likewise the solution to the robotics problem. Every arrow summons a _judgment_. In the original-brand implementation, they are Marvelous (±17 ms), Perfect (±34 ms), Great (±84 ms), Good (±124 ms), and Miss. (Apparently historical contingency forces us to suffer "Perfect" not being the best judgment. The American one at least has the decency to call the best judgment "Perfect!!" with two exclamation points, as distinguished from "Perfect".) -The judgments are a densely supervised training signal. Beyond a few words of high-level advice (try to alternate your feet), one does not "study" arrow-stomping. In principle, we could imagine a mind inspecting a sequence of upcoming arrows and searching for a motor plan to fit them, like a chess engine calculating variations. As a human, there's no time for that. One can only let one's policy be shaped by the rewards of the judgments. (The American-brand implementation provides gradient information by displaying "Early" or "Late" as part of the on-screen judgment; in the original, you have to toggle a config option.) +The judgments are a dense training signal. Beyond a few words of high-level advice (try to alternate your feet), one does not "study" arrow-stomping. In principle, we could imagine a mind inspecting a sequence of upcoming arrows and searching for a motor plan to fit them, like a chess engine calculating variations. As a human, there's no time for that. One can only let one's policy be shaped by the rewards of the judgments. (The American-brand implementation supplies gradient information by displaying "Early" or "Late" as part of the on-screen judgment; in the original, you have to toggle a config option.) -Arrows often come in patterns (like Left–Right–Left or Right–Up–Right), which can be "chunked" and loaded as one motor program, rather than read as individual notes. The chunking theory correctly predicts that losing the rhythm often results in correlated poor judgements on consecutive notes, in contrast to the independent "Gaussian" error on every step. A Great Fullcombo (completing a song with only Great or better judgments) isn't overwhelmingly harder than a Fullcombo (no Miss judgements): both imply having held the rhythm the whole way, with the Great Fullcombo ["only" (only)](https://zackmdavis.net/blog/2012/Oct/the-quieted-scare-convention/) requiring a tighter Gaussian variance. +Arrows often come in patterns (like Left–Right–Left or Right–Up–Right), which can be "chunked" and loaded as one motor program, rather than read as individual notes. The chunking theory correctly predicts that losing the rhythm often results in correlated poor judgments on consecutive notes, in contrast to the independent "Gaussian" error on every step. A Great Fullcombo (completing a song with only Great or better judgments) isn't overwhelmingly harder than a Fullcombo (no Miss judgments): both imply having held the rhythm the whole way, with the Great Fullcombo ["only" (only)](/blog/2012/Oct/the-quieted-scare-convention/) requiring a tighter Gaussian variance. -The levels of the game provide a smooth progression. As the player masters simpler patterns, higher difficulty levels provide new ones. On level 6 of the original-brand implementation, notes spaced at closer intervals (shown in different colors) become common. +The levels of the game provide a smooth progression. As the player masters simpler patterns, higher difficulty levels provide new ones. On level 6 of the original-brand implementation, notes spaced at closer intervals (blue arrows on odd eighths of a measure, contrasted to the red "quarter" notes) become common. Patterns like Left–Down–Right imply either a "crossover" putting one leg in front of the other (Left with left foot, Down with right foot, Right with _left_ foot) or breaking the pattern of alternating feet ("double-stepping"). Novices tend to double-step, but as the arrows become denser at higher levels, crossovers become a practical necessity to keep up with the beat. -[TODO— +And yet I'm reconstructing all this knowledge in words after the fact. No one told me to chunk patterns. At no point did I "practice" crossovers (only realizing I had done them for sure after careful reading and video review). Competences emerge as solutions determined by the training signal. Good (late) tells you to step faster, Great (early), a little slower. A desperate reach to hit a panel in time gets reinforced when it works, until the combined force of thousands of gradient steps inscribe a dance routine which can _only in retrospect_ be described in terms of "crossovers" or "double-stepping." -Patterns like Left–Down–Right imply +Ultimately, what makes the arrow-stomping game unusual isn't how impervious its robotics problem is to good old fashioned engineering, but how its rich training signal makes it permeable to anyone with enough time and quarters. I see online chess accounts with thousands of games over years and flat ratings. Apparently, mere experience isn't enough to solve the credit-assignment problem by which the difference between victory and loss might owe to positional weaknesses introduced in the opening. I also tried to learn gymnastics in 2024. It didn't take. Supposedly you can build up to a full handstand by starting against the wall, but even that wasn't enough of a gradient; I wasn't feeling out a clear path through parameter-space from kicking out off the wall for a few seconds to a clean, independent balance. When prodigies do make a better show of learning chess or gymnastics, it's with coaches and puzzles to smooth the way. The alternative to incrementally accreting complex skills from local rewards isn't designing them from clean principles—but not learning them at all. -either breaking - -(Left with left foot, Down with right foot, Right with _left_ foot) - -, in contrast to the - - -Contrast to chess where ratings can be flat for years of play—you have to study; you don't necessarily learn enough from experience. Contrast to gymnastics where I didn't have enough of a gradient to learn a handstand. - -at the beginning, I tried to treat the center as "home base"), but mostly, you play, and the judgments give you a gradient, and the levels give you a very smooth loss progression (patterns show up, then blue notes at level 6, and you get used to seeing the patterns as chunks and loading them as one motor program). You don't linguistically reason about where to put your feet, you just get a sense of it. (The pattern-chunking isn't a taught technique, it's a natural solution to the learning problem.) - -] - -A revolution. \ No newline at end of file +Apprehension of this [strange inversion of reasoning](https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0904433106) almost makes the present end-time seem like [less of a grotesque surprise](https://www.readthesequences.com/Think-Like-Reality). The steps we were already taking implied the seeds of the revolution. -- 2.53.0