Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordanbeiber | Hacker News Reader

Just watched the LOTR movies again last week and my wife and I complained specifically about how unrealistic, or simply bad, the attack on Helms Deep seemed.

For starters, that this article pops up just days after our discussion blew my mind.

The analysis really brings to light the depth of Tolkien. What could easily be chalked up to a standard large scale mindless action-movie (or book - even if the book is more nuanced) event is actually purposefully showing Sarumans arrogance, as well as ignorance.

Finally, this qoute made me think of a few enterprise software projects I’ve had to deal with as well:

> This is, I must say, a common mistake of amateurs – to propose extremely complex battle plans which could win the day on a computer or in an armchair discussion, but which are so complex that actually implementing them in the fog of war is nearly impossible.

View on HN

There must be some formal and rigorous way to argue against such crazy complex plans. Because I've seen my share as well, almost universally disastrous.

Perhaps they are optimizing for the "best possible" outcome rather than the "most likely" outcome? And I feel like that could be illustrated with a probability distribution. There would be bulge above "bad" on the horizontal and just the thinnest tail poking rightwards towards "great".

If a plan depends on a huge number of things going just the right way, there is a high probability of something going not as desired.

Intelligent officers could find a way around some of deviations from the plan, but they might not, because they lack a complete picture of the battle, because they might be not intelligent enough to devise a creative solution at the time, and because there a limits to the possible.

The more ways plan could go wrong, the more probability it would go wrong. The more deviations from the plan, the less probability than officers will be able to overcome them.

And one more thing: at war there is an enemy who will do anything to make life of your troops more difficult. Disrupting communications, disinformation, unexpected attacs and troops placement... there are a lot of ways, so even there is just one prerequisite for a plan to work, there is a good deal of a probability than it would go wrong.

In HPMoR[1] Yudkowski mocked complex plans, and proposed a rule:

> That was when Father had told Draco about the Rule of Three, which was that any plot which required more than three different things to happen would never work in real life.

> Father had further explained that since only a fool would attempt a plot that was as complicated as possible, the real limit was two.

[1] http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/24

I wonder if something like an inverse Ishikawa ("fish bone") diagram could be used.

Brings to mind one of my favorite quotes (not sure from where): "A plan is just a list of things that can go wrong".

Doesn't that last sentence pretty much sum up the Western Front in WW1 (from the Schlieffen Plan onwards)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com