The Badminton Gambit

I do not follow sports, and would never comment on a story  simply from an athletic standpoint, let alone give ethics lessons to Olympians.  Our province is logic.   But today’s stories about the badminton fiasco at the London Olympics -- in which some teams deliberately played to lose, so as to draw a weaker opponent at later, more crucial stages of the tournament -- immediately present a logical problem.

That people are ethically fallible is sad, but barely newsworthy.  A ballplayer who hurts his team by taking a dive for the sake of a bookie who has paid him off, is a sorry figure indeed.  But here that is not the case at all:  The players were playing as all honest players do:  to win;  only, to win the whole tournament, not this particular match.   From that standpoint -- likening the tournament to a chess-game -- phoning it in would be equivalent to sacrificing a pawn:  and nobody objects to that.
(Well, okay;  the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Pawns, one supposes; there's a lobby for everything these days.)

No, the interesting thing is that the tournament ground-rules should be so structured that losing a match -- not merely tying one -- could be advantageous, ever.   And if it is, the wonder is that the tactics being denounced  have not come into play more often -- far more often, in sport after sport  (and indeed, perhaps they have, only, more discreetly).  Clearly something is the matter with the logic of the rules.   Either that, or if the rules are universally embraced, the world should be nodding sagely at those teams of women from the Orient (that last factor, though logically beside the point, probably has figured, in giving this story legs), murmuring appreciatively, “Good move!”

There are other cases of play that seems cowardly or paradoxical in a myopic view, but which make sense on the larger canvas.  As, a quarterback deliberately throwing an uncatched pass so as to stop the clock in football;  or a bicylist in the early stages of a race, refraining from overtaking the bicyclist in front of him, so as to use him as a windbreak.

These tactics apply to even a single match-up;  but in a tournament, a logic is born out of the details of the rules, that go beyond such moves.  As, depending on the stage of the tournament, it may make sense (in chess) to play for a stalemate, or (in soccer or football, etc.) for a zero-zero game.  This makes for extraordinary boring play, and spectators to such a wheeze might well demand their money back (as did those at the Olympics badminton match);  but it is not unethical.

Mathematician John Barrow  treats of a specific such case,  “A Truly Weird Football Match”, in  his (gracefully written, though stupidly titled) , One Hundred Essential Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know (2008),  p. 155f.   And this, in a case where those crafting the rules of the tournament had done so with much forethought, attending to preclude one such paradox of play -- and thereby unexpectedly landing  splat  in another.

In another essay in the same volume, Barrow reports that “In 1981, the Football [i.e., soccer] Association made a radical change in the way its leagues operated,  in an attempt to reward more attacking play.  They proposed that 3 points be awarded for a win  rather than 2.  A draw still received just 1 point.”

Rule-setters will select game-logics that make for a lively game, because that is what spectators generally relish.  It’s not a moral imperative to play aggressively (pace the salvos against the badminton-players); it’s an aesthetic and commercial imperative.   And in some sports, like baseball and cricket, a premium is put, on the contrary, upon a leisurely pace, and indefinitely extensible games;  perhaps partly for this reason, the games entwine intricately with the national character, and are not subject to export.
(Compare William Temple's epigram:  "Cricket is organised loafing.")

Postscript:
If you found that thought-provoking, you might enjoy this, a consideration of Logic and the Law:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/07/laws-and-light-mindedness.html
(With a bonus reference to chess.)

Metapostscript:
Lordy! this post is getting a boatload of pageviews.  So here's another you might like, concerning, not the details of chess, but its tournament-logic:  specifically, how to make the game interesting again -- at the "Olympic" level so to speak -- now that machines have become dominant.
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/08/chess-challenge.html

 

Post-metapostscript:

I only offered up this trifle because it was quite at variance with the mostly condemnatory news-coverage (and readers’ commentary) from earlier in the day.  But by now a number of astute readers have made essentially the same point, and added much interesting sports-aware detail.   A sampling from the New York Times:

I guess the real question is: what is the goal of this whole charade? Is it to test real strength? Skill? Win the most medal? Get the most attention? Break the most record? Because from what I seen, these three teams used something their opponents didn't. That is intelligence. The intelligence to look at a situation and try to use the system against itself. A very clever move, that is unfortunately made the teams disqualified. However again, when you say strength and skill of a particular sport, doesn't human faculty for thinking outside the box and being more clever than your opponent count?

Here is a simple solution:
once the teams have been ranked after the preliminary round, the usual course is to match rank 1 against rank 4, rank 2 against rank 3 in the semifinals.

The issue isn't just winning a gold...if you lose in the semis, you play for a bronze. If you lose in the finals (to the team you would have played in the semis) you get a silver. There is a definite advantage to not playing #1 before the final round. If the #2 and #3 teams played off for bronze vs. silver, that could help a little.

Instead, let the top ranked team choose their opponent in the semifinals. Now the incentive to win is preserved.

Because of the disqualifications, lesser teams were promoted to the round of sixteen. Two of those teams, Australia and Canada just completed their match and I must say that I was treated to a standard of play that I could have witnessed at the local community center. Well maybe not, but I would have liked to have seen a higher level of skill which, because of the ineptitude of the custodians of the sport, was denied to the fans.

See how Britons remember their own throwing game in their Olympic promotion (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/rowing/9315052/London-2012-Oly...

".....Curiously, the course for their races at Henley was technically 200 metres short, but the fact that it went against the stream was deemed to make up the difference. Burnell, ever calculating, decided early upon an audacious but highly risky route to a gold medal, where the British double would deliberately lose their heat against the French to avoid meeting Denmark, their main rivals, in the semi-final. The ensuing repechage provided an extra race to reach competitive sharpness and smoothed their progress to a final where, sure enough, they encountered the Danes. "

A salute to the astute!   You know much more about all this than I do.  Perhaps I should stick to what I know best, which is penguins.

Footnote to the Post-metapostscript:

Precisely because logic abstacts from all inessentials, the lesson here applies well without the sphere of sports (let alone of the Olympics, or badminton).  In particular, to the logic of elections,  and run-off elections.

It turns out that, with the best will in the world, it is difficult to craft rules that will ensure results that accord with our philosophical instincts about what is for the best:  e.g. Condorcet’s paradox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_paradox

Such lines of thought branch out into an area of logic and mathematics  which -- nicely returning full-circle to our sports starting-point -- is known as game theory.

Update:  Metafootnote to the Footnote to the Post-metapostscript:

Blogspot stats reveal that someone just found this site by searching upon the following string:

            decided early upon an audacious but highly risky route to a gold

This startled me, as I could not recall ever having written any such thing -- though I might wish I had, as it sounds intriguing.  Turns out it is from a paragraph quoted in one of the quoted readers’-comments above (thus, a quote within a quote): “Burnell, ever calculating, decided early upon an audacious but highly risky route to a gold…”

All right now:  The interesting thing is, if you Google that, you find a small handful of hits -- the title-line of which, in almost every case, consists entirely of ideograms…

Update-squared:  A lot of people have been finding this post by that obscure sentence.  Weird.

Update [9 Aug 2012]:  Eka-Metafootnote to the Footnote to the Post-metapostscript:

Apart from athletics, another competitive arena is business.  And here, too, the task of drawing up effective ground-rules is trickier than you might think:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/09/world/asia/incentive-to-slow-climate-change-drives-output-of-harmful-gases.html?ref=global-home

Carbon Credits Gone Awry Raise Output of Harmful Gas

RANJIT NAGAR, India — Manufacturers have ramped up production of a common air-conditioning coolant, counting on a windfall for destroying a byproduct under a United Nations program.

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