Self-organisation was a key process discussed at the Complex Systems in Sports Congress at Camp Nou in Barcelona. PDP co-founder James Vaughan discusses the importance of understanding and observing self-organisation with video and reflections from Barcelona and Sweden. It was the end of the day and that meant free play. However, this freedom felt very restricted, very one-directional, very narrow. It was almost as if the players had blinkers on; constrained to only see forwards. Dribble forward, tackle, loose ball, transition! Dribble forward, tackle, loose ball, transition! Dribble…
self-organisation
Balague, C. Torrents, R. Hristovski, K. Davids, and D. Araujo The Big Idea Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) was a legendary Canadian poet, singer-songwriter, and novelist. The following lyrics are from his 1992 album The Future and the song “Anthem”: Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in. Let’s assume there is a crack in our conventional understanding of practicing, training for, and playing competitive sports. Not a break. Just…
Paul S. Glazier The Big Idea It’s GUT check time! We are all familiar with this cliché in sports performance: tests of gameness, courage, fortitude, stick-to-itiveness. But less familiar is another meaning of GUT. Beginning roughly in the late 1970s particle physicists began looking at the possibilities for the otherwise distinct three of the four forces in nature at high energy to merge into an indistinct single force. They called this model a Grand Unified Theory, or GUT for short. Over the years, this general…
Pedro Passos, Duarte Araújo, Keith Davids The Big Idea Since these investigators brought it up in their abstract’s first sentence, let’s briefly talk about ant colonies as a bridge to the subject of self-organization in field-invasion team sports. Imagine this. There is a flood threatening a colony of ants. What do they do? No problem or panic: they simply build an ant raft. These pancake-like rafts are composed of the ants themselves—sometimes as many as 100,000—who instinctively connect themselves perpendicular to each other—always heads up—and…