Evaluate your personal utility function over all possible future timelines of the universe, conditional on each of your possible moves.
The move that has the highest score is the best move.
Sure, there's a predictive aspect to it. What if your opponent zigs instead of zags, etc. But this is basically a matter of forecastable probabilities and can be added to your model. The optimal move still exists, no question about it.
Any problem of bodily motion through space has an optimal solution. In athletic situations, humans often can't think fast enough to find/utilize it, or aren't coordinated enough to move in the optimal way. And a biomechanically-perfect savant may still lose to an opponent vastly physically superior.
The comparison is unintentionally funny because it's the exact same "I can ignore the experience of the people who my work impacts because my models are perfect" mentality that produces unlivable apartments in dead lifeless streets.
Since ultimately, living, and living well, is about values, how do I choose to live, according to which values, science will never be able to capture that dimension.
I feel that scientists and technologists, and designers for that matter, should study more philosophy. It will open up their eyes to the fact that not every question is solvable by science.
The tend to assume the universe is deterministic.
They tend to assume (incorrectly) that because it's deterministic a good enough model will be able to predict or explain.
They tend to ignore or not even be aware of the inherent bias towards available and measurable data, or that what we can measure must capture the essential dimensions of it.
The most naive tend to assume that given enough data, a model will get better, that the noise will "average out" (it doesn't).
I don't have a good name for this, but it has all the trappings of a good -ism otherwise.
Beyond philosophy, they should study art, music, literature, and whatever else interests. They should spend time with others who do and not only with people who work in technology. Unfortunately, increasingly college CS programs have cut out general education requirements in favor of questionably useful skills training, leaving graduates in a state where this seems daunting.
Computer scientists are building the world we all have to live in. Is it so much to ask that they be educated in the humanities before they're turned loose to do so?
Show me.
At this point, people are even modeling figures on Ancient Greek pottery to determine the biomechanical merit of their fighting stances: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4663/12/12/317
The same or similar techniques, of course, can apply to any combination of fighters (or dancers, or swimmers, etc.) at any particular moment. At the highest levels of sport, biomechanics analysts are employed, e.g.: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34402417/
In any case, I don't think that I made any extraordinary claims. There are a lot of unknowns, though, as the most valuable analyses tend to be extremely computationally demanding.
A model that shows the optimal move for a fighter at any point in time.
You don’t actually have this. It can maybe be theoretically done, but not in practice.
I'm thinking of putting together a set of general biomechanical models for foil or kendo fencing. Both forms feature a highly constrained ruleset, which simplifies things. Hobby project, though, so maybe one of these days...
No, it is not. And no, there isn't.
This is exactly the sort of reductive mode of thought the article is calling out.