Paradigm-Busting to Whole New World

Two recent events, both in the sporting world, have once again shown how the paradigms we use to describe the world are often useful, but are in their own ways limited, and may well be fallacious.

The success of Leicester football club, however successful they have been, is not one of those examples. Over the course of a year, Leicester have gone from being bottom of the English Premier League to being almost certain champions. Within a framework where success is almost inevitably associated with spending power, Leicester have managed their feat on the back of previously rejected, or even amateur players, who have somehow come together and created a genuine fairy-story level of success. Nevertheless, however wonderful that story might be, it was not something that was planned for, but has been more in the way of an almost miraculous example of divine intervention.

The first truly paradigm-breaking example is that of another sporting team who have gone from also-rans to champions, and that is the US basketball team The Golden State Warriors, who have taken a simple aspect of basketball, changed its significance in a revolutionary way – and quite simply blown away the opposition. Traditionally, the three-point shot, taken from behind a line twenty-four feet from the basket, has been seen as the high-risk option, often used when a team had fallen behind and was running out of time to catch up. By realising that there was what a Wall Street Journal article described as a market inefficiency in the difference between the value of a three-pointer (50% more than two pointer), and the risk associated with it, the Golden State Warriors owners (who had a background in venture capital, and so were not bound by what was accepted as known facts by the rest of the basketball world), dismantled the team that they had and built a whole new one around the simple strategy: start taking a whole lot more 3-point shots. They soon realised that actually, with the right players, the three-point shot was at least as successful, if not more so, that the traditional two-point shot – and so history was made. Not only has Stephen Curry, the man the team has been built around, broken all records for three-point shots (what the WSJ article called ‘by almost every measure, one of the best seasons of any player in history’), but the team itself broke the record for the most victories in a season.

The other paradigm-breaking event was the magical Move 37, in game two of the recent Go match between the AlphaGo, the Google DeepMind computer, and Lee Sedol, a South Korean recognised as one of the greatest Go players ever. Even before the computer’s victory, it had been compared to the chess games between Deep Blue computer and Garry Kasporov in 1997, but whereas Deep Blue’s victory redefined the levels of complexity that a computer could manage, it was felt that Go, which has a level of open-ended creativity that creates an exponentially greater number of valid options for any move, would be a stage too far for a computer to deal with. The fact that not only did AlphaGo win, but did so in a way that left its human opponent with almost no opportunity for victory, reset the understanding of what is possible within a Go game. However, it was Move 37, a move that either had no obvious meaning, or was more likely a mistake, that caused commentators to state, in retrospect when the significance of the move became clear later in the game’ ‘that was a move no human would have made’.

And the lessons to be learned from all of the above? It seems to be that however clear and well-accepted the facts may be, there may well be a better, more effective way of doing something  - and if there is, it could be a genuine market-breaking event. Or alternatively, as Leicester have found out – just keep hanging in there, because you never know what opportunities are just around the corner.