The maverick strategist deserves his own page. Destruction and Creation is a difficult read, but his other works are
easily understood.
John Boyd has developed a strategic foundation that is useful for a machine playing a game. In fact, it will
likely develop in the years to come, I predict, that his OODA loop is central to any attempt by a machine to play a strategic
board game.
[from Wikipedia]
Boyd hypothesized that all intelligent organisms and organizations undergo a continuous cycle of interaction with their
environment. Boyd breaks this cycle down to four interrelated and overlapping processes through which one cycles continuously:
* Observation: the collection of data by means of the senses
* Orientation:
the analysis and synthesis of data to form one's current mental perspective
* Decision: the determination
of a course of action based on one's current mental perspective
* Action: the physical playing-out of
decisions
Of course, while this is taking place, the situation may be changing. It is sometimes necessary to cancel a planned action
in order to meet the changes.
This decision cycle is thus known as the OODA loop. Boyd emphasized that this decision cycle is the central mechanism
enabling adaptation (apart from natural selection) and is therefore critical to survival.
Boyd concluded that to maintain an accurate or effective grasp of reality one must undergo a continuous cycle of interaction
with the environment geared to assessing its constant changes. Boyd stated that the decision cycle was the central mechanism
of adaptation (in a social context) and that increasing one's own rate and accuracy of assessment vis-a-vis one's counterpart's
rate and accuracy of assessment provides a substantial advantage in war or other forms of competition.
In 2007, strategy writer Robert Greene discussed the loop in a post called OODA and You. He insisted that it was
"deeply relevant to any kind of competitive environment: business, politics, sports, even the struggle of organisms to survive",
and claimed to have been initially "struck by its brilliance".
JLJ - This guy has some good ideas. Too bad his genius was not recognized in his time.
