Essay: The Three Pillars of Learning, Part 1: Technique

Technique is King

If there is one concept that is the most important key to learning everything, it's that different methods lead to different results, given the same time put in.  And, that the difference can be absolutely massive, as well as decisive.

This is the essence of technique.  Technique is not your innate ability or talent (although the two are related), nor is it your work ethic and discipline.  Technique is the method which with you learn, and it is the single most important thing in learning.  I will defend this argument with several examples, including an example from another hobby of mine: piano.

Insane Difficulty: The Piano Analogy

Take a look at this picture, which is an excerpt from the sheet music of a Piano Concerto by the Russian romantic classical composer Rachmaninoff:

http://i.imgur.com/Rv2b0.jpg

It doesn't matter if you can't read music or if you are an accomplished musician.  Your first reaction upon looking at this is probably: "What the heck is going on?"  Here is a YouTube video of many performances of this cadenza (as well as the slightly easier alternative, or ossia). However, before you view this, I would highly recommend listening to a recording of Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto first, as it is one of the most complicated and beautiful creations of mankind and I wouldn't want to spoil it for you.  In any case, the link is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFPg017uVNg

Now, this cadenza alone is something only an accomplished pianist can even attempt to play, and it's only about 5 minutes out of a piano concerto that is around 40 minutes long when played in it's entirety.  I picked this example to talk about because this Concerto is notorious not only for it's staggering difficulty, but it's beauty as well.  It will be next to impossible to make sense of the sheet music if you can't read music, but it will be enough to say that each black dot is a note, and on the third page 4 notes on top of each other means that one hand is pressing four notes at once, and 5 on top of each other means every single finger is pressing a note spanning a octave (8 notes) or more.  Of course, there are dozens and dozens of these 4-note chords (referred to as seventh chords in music) and 5-note chords played in a row at an incredibly fast rate.  For those who are familiar with sheet music, I hardly need to explain anything.

So how the heck does one even try to play something like this?  A similar feeling might be felt when standing at the edge of a 257 block, or looking at an extreme kz map like kz_sandblock2 where it takes you 100 tries to do the very first jump, and then contemplating what it would take to beat the entire map without falling once when there are hundreds of jumps of equal difficulty.  This sense of staggering, ominous difficulty about some endeavors in life can put you off to them, but at the same time it can also intrigue you.  From playing the Cadenza to beating an extreme KZ map, it appears such things are possible as they have been done before, but how they were done is quite often a mystery to many people who participate in such hobbies.

The first gut feeling that many people have is that such things are almost impossible to achieve, but there are a few people who are extraordinarily gifted who can achieve them.  This is the theory that talent is the most important component of accomplishment.  This idea is intuitive because it's so simple - some people are good at something, and some aren't.  Unfortunately, this theory of learning sets barriers to those of us 'mere mortals' who weren't born with some innate gift at playing the piano or jumping a 257 block.  Thus, it discourages us and puts us off, and many people facing down this idea can understandably give up on any goal they had of achieving the "impossible".

The good news is that this theory is wrong.  The video has 23 pianists playing the cadenza (I believe all of them played the entire concerto as well) and part two of the video has another 23 for a total of 46.  If you look at them, you can see the diversity in the people who have attempted and played it successfully and beautifully.  If you've ever talked to an accomplished pianist, or someone accomplished in anything, most are surprisingly candid in telling you that they don't feel they had a great deal of innate ability.  They may of course be biased, but the general theme from people of this type who express themselves on the topic of their own learning, is that they feel that much of what they do can be accomplished by almost anyone, but they would have had to be on the right track.

Chess: Everyman's Game

Jeremy Silman, a chess player who was an International Master and wrote many books about chess, feels that he wasn't anything special when it came to chess, but he stumbled upon some excellent ideas and methods for systematizing his though process and approach.  He also played chess from an early age, had good instruction as a pupil, and was naturally propelled on that trajectory.  As someone who is as qualified as anyone to speak about such matters, he strongly feels that almost anyone can achieve the level of a master with the right approach.  A master is 2000 rating to 2200, whereas he achieved a level of 2200-2400, and a grand master has a rating of 2600 or more.  The best chess player in the world at the moment, the 21-year old prodigy Magnus Carslen, has a rating of 2826, and the all time highest rating belongs to the genius Garry Kasparov who achieved a rating of 2851.  So Silman isn't saying we can all become the best chess player who ever lived.  But a master level player is someone who can hold their own with the best, and can draw against an accomplished grand master or maybe even win the occasional lucky and extremely well-played game.   A rating of 1200 in chess is about the level of an accomplished hobbyist, who could totally wipe out a beginner.  My own current rating is around 1400.  A beginner would be rated 800 or lower.  So the statement that anyone can become a master is indeed a bold statement.  If you compared piano to chess, a "master" level piano player could play this cadenza.

So what does he have to back it up, besides his own experiences?  Let's first consider the obvious objection - he is biased, and unaware of his own talents.  If talent weren't a big deal, then we would all be geniuses at whatever we do.  I believe I can show why this objection is fundamentally wrong, but also why it still contains a kernel of truth that muddies the waters when discussing learning on its own.  There is perhaps one talent that is very important in learning and will always be pretty important: how fast you learn.  This is demonstrably different from person to person, but perhaps more importantly, it is very different from age group to age group.  There has to be an explanation for a 21-year old Norwegian that is currently demolishing everyone in Chess, much like Bobby Fischer did back in his day.  When he was 13, he beat a strong master with a queen sacrifice and a checkmate with minor pieces, which was called the Game of the Century.

What About Mozart, Einstein, and Robert James Fischer?

The importance of learning quickly I do not dispute.  However, the most important point that Silman and many others are making is that learning methods can be taught and improved, as well as techniques.  Not innate ability, not time put in, not even who you are playing against.  Rather, what your approach or methods are, and the tools in your toolbox.  There is no aspect of innate ability that is so important that it can prevent anyone from achieving practically anything if they put in the time.  However, this can only be true if have they right methods and tools, or they would waste extraordinary time and effort and quit in frustration.  However, the reason why brilliant learners become so good is because they discover and re-discover incredible methods and techniques!  If they didn't, they too would waste endless time and effort and see mediocre or non-existent results, and then would give up concluding that they don't have the talent to bother with it.

In addition to the fact that techniques and methods of learning can be improved by anybody with the right knowledge and instruction, there are many obstacles to becoming a professional that have nothing to do with the process of learning itself - most notably, age barriers and one's path through life.  A big part of becoming a professional at anything is ending up on that optimal trajectory through life into your chosen profession.  It has been scientifically demonstrated that humans learn much quickly and more effectively when they are young, particularly around age 12 when the brain is maturing and developing.  Many other types of learning also begin at an early age.  This is an aspect of talent that actually can be considered important, but it's related to properties of age of humans in general rather than the innate ability of any individual person.  If the best methods are taught at this age, as well as the best habits, and then the pupil is given the best instruction and goes straight up the ranks through high school, to college, and eventually to a professional career, of course they will have a huge advantage over someone who is an adult learner picking up something for the first time.  I am arguing that if we all happened to follow that perfect trajectory, that there would be very few among us who would NOT become professionals at whatever it is we were pursuing in our hypothetical universe.

I wouldn't argue against the idea that for an adult learner with no previous experience, the learning experience can be much more difficult and thus a practical barrier is raised for learning difficult things, but it need not be. It can be discouraging to put so much time and effort into something and not see the results you want.  But the whole point of this essay is that there is a solution to this problem and there is no barrier whatsoever in accomplishing it - to improve your technique.  I wasn't kidding when I said that is by far the most important key to learning, but before I could make this point I had to dispel the myth that talent is the most important part of learning.

The second part of the argument is showing why time and effort alone will not get you the results you want, because of the original point addressed: different methods yield vastly different results, with the same time put in.

Time Plus Effort Minus Method Equals Failure: Case Study, A Noob and His 240 Block


Consider, for example, a 240 longjump block that you've decided you want to conquer.  You load up kz_longjumps2 into your listen server and you head to the block to do battle.  You don't have much experience yet, having only jumped around in a public server.  Maybe you've been playing maps for about a month, and beat a few of them with checkpoints.  You go up to the block and your first reaction is, "what the heck is going on?"  That's when the ominous difficulty sets in.  After a few attempts, you realize you are coming nowhere close, or maybe you are?  You aren't sure because you don't have a plugin to tell you.  You keep going at it for about an hour, and never make it once.  Your hands are tired, you're eyes and back ache, and you're just about ready to put your long jump career on hold for good.

A lot of players might balk and make fun of the player in this scenario, but that's probably because they've forgotten when this player is who they once were.  Or, there are a lot of players who never had to deal with this because they were taught the proper techniques from other good players which gave them a near-infinite start on the poor player of our story.  Anyone who understands long jumping knows that if you don't know what a pre-strafe is or how to accomplish it, then trying to jump a 240 block is utterly hopeless (at least as a new player, I'm not talking LJ grandmasters who straight jump it just for a challenge.)  Many players might not remember an era where no one knew what a pre-strafe was, until some players stumbled upon it by chance, including the famous USA jumper with the alias of "Supa".  This "dark age" is the world that the player of our scenario inhabits - an era before the wheel, and he has to reinvent it all by himself (as well as the steam engine, the combustion engine, and the nuclear reactor).

Strangely enough, the point I am making here won't seem so controversial to many readers from the KZ community, yet I hear so many others argue how "everything else" is just a matter of being good, or time put in.  Technique only matters to a point, they might say, and then you just have to do it and figure it out.  Yet if you apply the logic above it seems that this can only be wrong.  It is true that you have to put a lot of hard work learning new techniques and practicing them, and this hard work is indispensable.  But it is false to say that there is an end to technique, because there isn't.  New techniques are discovered all the time, and they expand what is possible in the game - they push back the limits by allowing more efficient and effective ways of accomplishing things.  Although they expand what is possible, it will still of course take time and hard work to get there, because some techniques can only be learned after learning others, and the newer ones are likely to be harder than what came before, because chance dictates that the easiest methods that produce the largest improvements will be found first.

Techniques can improve over time, and not all techniques are equally important.  As mentioned, the techniques discovered late in a game's evolution might only offer minor improvements compared to a quantum leap like the discovery of the pre-strafe gave the KZ community. Nevertheless, they are there, and the hardest working and most creative players will gradually and very slowly stumble on them.   Many players who are very good at KZ make use of techniques that few players (or maybe even no one else) knows about, yet many of them aren't even consciously aware that they are doing so, because they are quick learners who stumbled on them by accident.

However, the key point is that techniques benefit everyone who learns them, not just the ones who discovered them, and allows anybody, no matter how mundane in their ability, to achieve great heights.  This is how great heights are achieved - by making use of what others have discovered so you don't have to reinvent the wheel yourself.  It doesn't make greatness certain, but it makes it possible for practically anyone who puts in the time.  Perhaps most importantly, it makes accomplishing your goals far more manageable.

Another very important point is that concept of technique encompasses a wide variety of things.  We have to distinguish between in-game tricks and movements, like the pre-strafe, methods for performing them outside the game, like winding up your mouse going into it, and methods for learning things more efficiently, like having a plugin that shows your speed in units a second, and having +forward and +moveright or +moveleft on in the console while you turn in circles to learn the proper rate of turn.


Whether they are in-game tricks, physical approaches, or methods of learning, they all give you an advantage and allow you to go much, much farther than what would be possible if you were a beginner stumbling around in the dark.


1) Learning methods will turn what looks impossible into something that is trivially easy, and therefore allow players to see themselves making steady progress towards their desired goals, and thus keep them motivated.

2) In-game tricks will allow them to perform feats that greatly improve and aid their movement and make beating maps and jumping distances easier.

3) Physical approaches will make in-game techniques become much easier and more effortless to accomplish, and will thus push back the limits of what they can achieve with these techniques.


Never Use Checkpoints!  Or, A Lesson in the Complete Opposite of Correct

If you are trying to beat an extreme map, does it make sense to play the whole map from start to finish over and over?  Some people have insisted to me that the way to no check a hard map is to start from the beginning, and never use checkpoints until you finally do it.  They must be masochists or otherwise enjoy pain, right?  I always thought how senseless it was to practice jumps that you can do with your eyes closed over and over again just for one opportunity to practice the hard jump and, if you fail, you must put in 3 more minutes of wasted effort and energy to get back to the same jump.

Actually, they had a seemingly intuitive explanation - by using checkpoints, your 'flow' through the map will be hindered because instead of training to do one jump after another, you are training to jump from one perfect starting point on each block.  It seems logical enough, and if you try to learn jumps one jump at a time with checkpoints you might notice some problems putting them all together.

Of course, this intuitive judgement of the situation is completely wrong, because the titanic benefit to efficiency of using checkpoints VASTLY outweighs the potential pitfalls of using too many checkpoints in a way that's hard to convey using human language.  Trying to learn how to no-check an extreme map without checkpoints is probably hundreds or even thousands of times less efficient than with them.  The key to overcoming this pitfall is somewhat counter-intuitive - in addition to practicing jumping from a certain spot, you need to practice the movement from one block to the other, and then the movement that sets you up in your starting position for the next jump.  These movements can be called the "conjunction", and it's how you resolve the flow problem.  And actually, every part of this method involves checkpoints.

The only pitfalls of checkpoints are when you abuse them early in your development so that you never actually learn how to do the jumps, but even this might be a phantasm - one can imagine how one might decide to deliberately limit the use of their CPs so that they first aim to beat an extreme map using as many as they need, then they try to beat small sections without them, and so on, until they are beating the map with only a few at key safe spots, and finally, the entire map. They are an incredibly powerful tool and it is actually quite difficult to abuse them.

Nevertheless, I was convinced these "experts" were right because they were better than me, so I took it to heart.  Well, this "expert advice" sure wasted a lot of my time and effort.  Of course you should use checkpoints on difficult jumps, that seems almost like common sense!  But many, many players have told me that you should never use checkpoints, so one man's common sense is another man's folly.  Except for one thing - one idea is objectively, demonstrably, WRONG.  This is because a lot of 'common sense' and 'intuition' turns out to be wrong upon further scrutiny.

"Moneyball": Another Fable of the Follies of 'Common Sense'

In the movie "Moneyball" that came out recently in the USA, Brad Pitt stars as a general manager of the Oakland A's baseball franchise who ended up starting a revolution in the sport when he hired a statistician to help him recruit players.  Instead of relying on the methods of expert recruiters who made judgments based on their intuition and experience, he trusted a statistician who had methods of determining the on-base percentage of a player.  That was all he used from that point on - simply choose players who had the highest on-base percentage.  He was able to acquire his entire team with a budget that was one seventh the budget of the Yankees, and yet they ended up beating the all time baseball record of games won in a row that was formerly held by the Yankees - 21 games.  They also came close to winning the Pennant.

Conclusion - Stickin' it to the Glory Boys

It's no secret that most people who seem absurdly "talented" at video games are usually younger players, right around the stage of early adolescence.  Sooner or later, they can no longer benefit from that hyper-accelerated learning advantage, and then they become "washed up".  But before that happens, they are sure to play up their extraordinary "talent" and downplay the techniques and knowledge of their predecessors that were handed to them on a silver platter, or the ones they discovered themselves by accident but can't put a name to even if they tried, as well as the enormous time and effort they put in "geeking" things while calling everyone else a "nerd".

This essay is meant to put an end to all of that nonsense.  Technique is the most important pillar of learning.  Time, effort, and work ethic is the second pillar, and is also very important.  Innate talent or ability is a distant third.


Time and effort put in without the right methods is wasted, and it is potentially thousands of times less efficient then time put in with the right methods.  This leads to discouragement, frustration, and ultimately failure.

Everyone needs to work hard to achieve anything that can be called a great achievement.  If someone didn't work hard to achieve it, then we can safely say it wasn't all that impressive of an achievement in the first place.  Talent on its own without hard work gets you nothing, despite what some glory-obsessed players might want you to believe.

Finally, everyone who is "talented" is just a quick learner who has discovered the right methods and uses them even if they aren't consciously aware of it.

Technique is King, let it be known.  Work ethic is Queen, and talent is the court jester.  This mindset applies equally to anything and everything that can be learned.  In future posts, I will start tackling the specifics of what technique is, how to acquire it, and my extensive knowledge of techniques for CS, and to a lesser extent, KZ.

-CoC

Introduction

Hello,

My name is Byron Challoner, and I've been playing the game of Counter-Strike 1.6 for over 12 years.  The alias I have used most of this time is "CowOnCrack", although I've changed it for fun to break the monotony from time to time. The game was released in June of 1999, and I started playing it a few days after it came out.  The next year I would be a freshman in high school.  I was a part of organized team play from the very beginning of the game, leading up to around 2009.  I've competed on teams participating in many famous leagues, such as the old USA league CAL-invite, CEVO-P, and most recently in CEVO-Main and ESEA-Main.  I've also attended two CPL (Cyber-Athlete Professional League) events, which used to be one of the largest international CS tournament venues before the company went under.

More recently in my CS career, a teammate and friend of mine from the ESEA/CEVO-Main team Teknicality, alias "Peyote[lp]", showed me an entirely different side of the game called "KZ".  I first started playing this game towards the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009.  KZ is short for "Kreedz" which is the alias of the player who made the very first maps with a climbing theme.  The concept of the game was pretty simple.  Not unlike a real rock climb, you have to reach the top of something (sometimes maps were literally mountains, or trees, or things much more creative) and there are a series of steps and obstacles getting there.  The focus then is entirely on the movement part of the game, which turns out to be an incredibly deep challenge on its own.

You can create save points along the way so that you can return to them if you fall, sort of like a real climber who sets ropes and anchors, but of course the ultimate challenge is to beat the map with no save points, so that the slightest misstep can send you to the bottom.  There is a real life analog to this, which is the incredible and insane sport of free soloing, which means climbing a peak with no gear at all.  Similarly, it is usually pretty futile to attempt a long difficult climb without save points in KZ unless you thoroughly know the jumps and the route.  In real life, attempting a climb without gear without thoroughly knowing the route and what you are doing is rather suicidal.  Apparently Kreedz himself is an avid rock climber, and his maps can give you a sense of vertigo and fear as well as a feeling of great accomplishment when you reach the top.

I immediately took a strong liking to this game, and was amazed at how deep of a game it was considering it merely focused on one aspect of another game.  It also clearly wasn't the intent of the developers for the players to only focus on movement, which makes it all the more surprising that so many tricks and techniques were discovered.  Many of the techniques in KZ are merely by-products of glitches in the engine, or tricks performed by unusual combinations of movements. Yet, intriguingly, these aspects give the game layer after layer of challenge and difficulty.  It seems that just as a new technique is discovered and assimilated by the best players, another one is soon on the horizon.

Although KZ has always been primarily a competition with yourself and your limits, the website www.xtreme-jumps.eu holds the best recorded times for the hundreds of official maps, while cosy-climbing holds the best records for over a thousand unofficial maps.  Their formats are similar, but Cosy is more accommodating about which maps it allows records for, and doesn't have a section for distance jumps, also known as longjumps.  Completing some maps is certainly a challenge, but doing so quickly and without errors presents a whole new set of difficulties for the player.

So what is the purpose of this blog?  Well, at the end of my CS career, I found myself discouraged to learn that CS as a game is very likely to disappear in a few years, and all of the time I put in the game and all of the knowledge I acquired could not be put to use.  Obviously, I didn't expect to become a professor of CS when I was playing this game - the game itself was worth playing on its own.  But one the greatest things I've enjoyed about this game is helping other players discover the game, as well as trying to understand the mechanisms behind how the game works.  This includes the game mechanics, what the best methods and practices are, and most importantly, why they work.  This sense of curiosity extends to my other hobbies and my life in general, and I know I'm not alone.

In particular, KZ holds a fascination for me because I have extensive knowledge about Counter-Strike 1.6 as a whole, yet there is much about KZ I do not know.  In particular, the feats and abilities of some players in KZ seem almost unreal from my stand point as a (relative) newcomer of only around 4 years.  KZ for me is somehow both a familiar and new challenge at the same time, and I hope to one day understand the whys and hows of this discipline of CS that was seemingly invented from thin air.

It may be true that the knowledge of how to be good at this particular video game is knowledge that will have very little value in the future.  However, in the process of analyzing and breaking down a video game or anything else, you learn a lot about learning itself.  You come see the similarities between the various different hobbies you enjoy or even what you are pursuing in school or learning on the job.  This kind of knowledge is valuable, especially in a world where one can't rely as much on a "stock" of knowledge that has value and will secure their future for the rest of their life. Quickly learning new things is an important part of the environment we find ourselves in.

Most people don't aim to put this kind of time and energy into a video game, and I don't blame them.  Not everyone takes video games so seriously, or gets excited about the idea of analyzing them in depth.  It is a hobby unto itself, and if you find it "nerdy" then I would agree with you!  It definitely is, but there you have it.  Each person has his or her own way, and if this isn't your cup of tea then feel free to pass on it!

This is my first blog, so this will be yet another exciting learning experience for me.  In the future I will begin adding posts covering various topics about learning and also specifics about CS and KZ, but for now this lengthy introduction will suffice.

-CoC