Shooting Dice

I some­times play a game with dice — I call it “the ran­dom new tech­nique game”, and I’m going to out­line it here so you can exper­i­ment with sim­i­lar ideas.

Using a ran­dom mod­i­fier such as a die or a deck of cards is noth­ing new, and I’ve heard lots of sto­ries about dif­fer­ent ver­sions used for work­outs and games in sports train­ing sit­u­a­tions. Here’s one such example:

I used to do a work­out with a friend in which we would split a card deck into two halves and deal exer­cises to each other. Hearts were push-ups, clubs were sit-ups, dia­monds were squats, and spades were chin-ups. The num­ber of the card told us how many to per­form. It was always fun watch­ing his facial expres­sions when I would save all my kings for last…

One inter­est­ing aspect of Taido is the unsoku, sotai, seiho, kimegi, gen­tai frame­work to the tech­niques. It gives a some­what mod­u­lar qual­ity to tech­ni­cal com­po­si­tion and sug­gests that there are many more pos­si­ble com­bi­na­tions than those fre­quently taught in classes.

I actu­ally first learned about mod­u­lar sys­tems when I was study­ing about old, ana­log music syn­the­siz­ers and was struck by the con­ven­tion for these musi­cal instru­ments to be described using flow­charts. The com­po­nents of many old synths can be arranged in var­i­ous orders with vary­ing degrees of feed­back to cre­ate new and inter­est­ing sounds.

A few days later, I was flip­ping through some Taido notes and noticed that the tech­nique process was also a flow­chart. I decided to try Taido tech­nique as a mod­u­lar process and see if I could find some new and inter­est­ing tech­niques. After a few hours of exper­i­ment­ing, I had made sev­eral pages of notes. I decided that I needed a neater way to list all the pos­si­bil­i­ties I had found, so I made up a sim­ple chart. Eventually, I started rolling a die to choose val­ues ran­domly from each col­umn, and “the ran­dom new tech­nique game” was born.

Play the Game

My orig­i­nal ver­sion of this dice game began with rolling a die sev­eral times:

roll 1:

1/2=unsoku, 3/4=unshin, 5/6=both

roll 2a:

1=so/in, 2=ka/gen, 3=ko/ten, 4=tsui/tai, 5=henka, 6=hengen (roll again, even/odd to choose)

roll 2b:

1=zenten (hand­spring), 2=koten, 3=shazenten, 4=bakuten, 5=sokuten (sokuchu), 6=bakuchu

roll 3:

1=sen, 2=un, 3=hen, 4=nen, 5=ten, 6=2^nd unsoku/unshin (back to roll 1)

roll 4:

1=jun, 2=gyaku, 3=ushiro, 4=tobi/tobikomi, 5=2noashi, 6=fukuteki

roll 5:

1=punch, 2=strike, 3=kick, 4=takedown/throw, 5=grab/joint, 6=2^nd sotai (back to roll 4)

To play the game, you sim­ply roll once for each vari­able, and the num­ber tells you what value to insert. For instance, I may roll 3, 2, 6, 4, 4, 3, 4 (since the third roll called for another unshin, I had to roll seven times). According to the chart above, that means “koten, bakuten, ten­tai ushiro takedown/throw”. Now my job is to fig­ure out a way to move which matches that descrip­tion. The sim­plest appli­ca­tion in this instance would prob­a­bly be koten, bakuten dogarami.

I once rolled 1, 1, 3, 5, 1, 6, 4, 4, 3 — unsoku, so/in (in), ten­tai, jun, 2^nd sotai, nen­tai, tobi, kick. Combining the ten/nen inspired my favorite per­sonal dice-game cre­ation so far: a tobi jun nen­tai keri from in-soku; it looks sort of like a cross between a 90-degree hangetsu and sokuchu and seems to come out of nowhere when I use it in jissen.

Sometimes, I roll a com­bi­na­tion that I have prac­ticed before. Sometimes I roll a com­bi­na­tion that seems impos­si­ble. Every roll teaches me some­thing new about taido, and as a result, my think­ing about taido tech­nique is incred­i­bly fluid. Though my body can’t always keep up, my brain never gets “stuck” for cre­ative inspi­ra­tion in tech­nique cre­ation. Playing games like this with taido gives me an infi­nite pool of pos­si­ble com­bi­na­tions with which to chal­lenge my imag­i­na­tion and tech­ni­cal ability.

Anyway, give it a shot. Come up with your own vari­a­tions. I’d love to hear about other ran­dom mod­i­fiers peo­ple have used for cre­ative taido prac­tices. Dave in Australia told me a few days ago that they had used cards to ran­dom­ize their jis­sen prac­tice by draw­ing cards to decide which tech­niques to use for offense/defense, etc. That’s a good idea that I plan to try sometime.

I’d espe­cially love to hear if any­one comes up with usable shingi by this method. Try it, and let me know what you think.

A Software Version?

A cou­ple of years ago, I asked a stu­dent who is a pro­gram­mer to design a sim­ple ran­dom tech­nique gen­er­a­tor based on my dice game. I gave him a request that would allow for the fol­low­ing variables:

1. unsoku, unshin, or some combination
2. optional ini­tial sotai for movement
3. direc­tion — front, back, jun, gyaku
4. optional jump, dive, slide, or step
5. sotai for tech­nique (con­di­tion of body dur­ing weapon deployment)
6. weapon — spe­cific punch or kick

My goal was to account for any com­bi­na­tion o unsoku/unshin, any sin­gle or com­bined sotai, any direc­tion, any use of seiho, and any strike/kick/other weapon — unsoku, sotai, seiho, kimegi, gen­tai (and pos­si­ble iterations) — in an algo­rithm that could use some sort of ser­ial logic to pull val­ues from a data­base of move­ments. Unfortunately, the iter­a­tions make the algo­rithm pretty com­plex, and my stu­dent never got around to fin­ish­ing the project.

Appeal

If any­one out there can cre­ate such a pro­gram (and it really shouldn’t be too very hard), I will com­pen­sate you for the price of one beer for your trou­bles. I would love to have such a pro­gram exe­cuted as a php code that could be run on this site — avail­able freely to taido stu­dents around the world. As my pri­mary goal with this web­site is to inspire cre­ative and crit­i­cal think­ing for con­tin­ued devel­op­ment and evo­lu­tion of taido, I can think of very few things that would be more fit­ting for me to host than a ran­dom movement-technique inspi­ra­tion machine.

So, pro­gram­mers, get to work! Seriously, I’ll be your best friend if you can make this for me, and i’m good for that beer money too.

Update: See com­ments for pro­grams sub­mit­ted by Juha. — thanks, Juha.

Re-update: The tech-gen was com­pleted and inte­grated into the side­bar for sev­eral months, but I lost my edits when I changed Taido/Blog’s cos­met­ics with­out back­ing up first. Anyway, the links to Juha’s ver­sion are a good start­ing point — give them a go.