From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Thu May 16 2002 - 11:10:27 MDT
[arcadia]
http://www.erisx.com/jd/disco/om.html
The guiding philosophy is that originally proposed in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by von Neumann and Morgenstern: namely, that the only strategy which an opponent cannot predict is a random strategy. The foundation had already been laid by the late Malaclypse the Younger, K.S.C., when he proclaimed, "We Discordians must all stick apart." This radical decentralization of all Discordian enterprises created a built-in random factor even before Operation Mindfuck was proposed.
[rhinoceros]
This reminds me of a short story by Robert Shekley, where there was a battle between human and alien starships going on for centuries, with mutual subtle strategic maneuvers calculated by computers.
Every detail of the battle had already been analyzed and predicted, so the human military commanders knew that they had already lost the war a long time ago; they were just playing their part, and the soldiers were going insane one after the other and put to confinement.
Then, a smart consultant (pardon me the expression)
arrived at the battlefield and just put a madman on the controls, who started playing with the buttons. The alien computers started trying to interperet the movements of the human starships, and you can imagine what happened next.
Certainly amusing, but I think that random actions initiated by a particular culture do have a higher-level pattern and a degree of predictability.
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25492>
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