B61
Public Record
Excerpt from book.

Mechanical and Fluid Skillsets: An investigation into learning and developing skills.

Real-World Examples

The Remerican National Checkers Championship is held each spring in New Derlins, FN. I had never heard of the competition before but happened to be visiting the area for a family event and so on a whim I decided to attend. During that time I had been spending a lot of time developing the theory of Mechanical and Fluid Skillsets, and so watched in the hopes that it could lend some insight.

At the time, the reigning National Checkers Champion was 56-year-old Goddard Schvotts, a player who, according to the announcers, had “memorized every match he’s ever seen — and he can recall each movement and the outcome of any one of them, at a moment’s notice.” His opponent, 15-year-old Vellinger Loois, was a self-taught checkers player who quickly made her way through the finalist bracket. Announcers praised young Loois’s “preternatural understanding for the game” and her “uncanny ability to read and understand the competition.” Before the games began, I wrote down that Schvotts had a Mechanical understanding of checkers and Loois had a Fluid understanding, based solely on the descriptions of the players.

In their first match, Schvotts beat Loois swiftly. It seemed like Scvhotts was aware of something that Loois wasn’t; as if he were following a routine strategy. The second, however, ended in a draw — as did the six following matches. After the seventh draw the announcer stated, “Even if Loois loses this Championship, the performance of this young prodigy is nothing short of exemplary.” In the eighth match, Loois appeared more calm than she appeared in the first game. She seemed almost to be smiling, as if she knew a secret. The only noise in the room was the sound of Schvotts clearing his throat a few times each minute. Loois won the eighth match, and then the ninth, claiming the championship title with 6 1/2 to 3 1/2 (1 win by Schvotts, 7 draws, 2 wins by Loois), making her the youngest champion in the competition’s history.

From this case I deduced that, in a competition between a Mechanical player and a Fluid player, the Mechanical learner has the initial advantage. Schvotts had strategies and methods which he had collected over time and was able to use immediately against his opponent. Loois, however, showed an entirely separate understanding for the game that Schvotts knew so well. Her decisions weren’t based on anything she’d seen or studied, but an intuition she had developed through self-experimentation. At the start of the games, her moves seemed haphazard, and they very well might have been. But it seemed to me while I watched them that she was studying Schvott’s responses to her unpredictability. The longer these competitors play, the more a Fluid player can understand from the Mechanical player’s choices. Therefore, a Fluid player’s knowledge grows with every game, where a Mechanical player’s is fixed in what she or he has perviously learned through observation and recital. […]

Thadd J. Cramp