Month: January 2021
Posted on January 3, 2021
Coherency and the Game Combos
In statistics, one learns very early on that independent random variations tend to cancel out when grouped together. By the law of large numbers, the collective behavior of many independent random entities tends to closely reflect the average behavior of these entities. This is very convenient if we see the random variations as being meaningless noise and were only interested in the average. But if the variations contained all the interesting complexity, then the complexity is washed away in the aggregate. In a generic society, the generics may be highly varied and individually very complex. Naively put them in a group and the collective behavior is simpler – quite plausibly, the variations cancel toward zero and the group achieves nothing as a whole.
This all changes if the random variations were not independent and tended to align along certain dimensions. The variations will be amplified wherever they align, and the collective behavior of the group cleanly emphasizes the alignment of its constituents. If we want a group of generics to retain a meaningful identity distinct from the average of its members, we need to give the generics a desire to align with each other in behavior or motivation. The topic of today’s post is the coherency domain, which contains ideas that lend well to being mixed with other constructs to describe nontrivial social behaviors. As an example, I will use concepts from the coherency domain to describe the gaming combos, which are a set of methods for creating alignment even between unrelated or mutually exclusive activities through the common participation of a bigger event.