The Martial Unity

In other words, it was a contest of whether he should go for a top-down approach when creating the technique or a bottom-up one.

“Hard to say, I’m not partial to either way.” He stirred where he sat, immersed in deep thought. “I would suspect that in different circumstances, different approaches are most optimal.”

How was he to discern which approach was most optimal in what circumstance, however?

Furthermore, even if he got the right approach, how would he know whether his created technique was the most optimal creation?

It was possible that whatever technique he ended up creating in a given situation, while good enough, was not the optimal or the best possible technique.

Perhaps other Martial Artists would be satisfied with just this alone, but not Rui.

“Whatever technique I create must be the best possible technique I could possibly create at that moment.” His eyes narrowed with determination. “I will not tolerate sub-optimal outcomes.”

Project Water was about optimal and maximal adaptive evolution.

He would settle for nothing but the absolute best.

Nothing less was tolerable.

“I need to find a way to objectively ensure that the created technique is objectively the most antithetical technique that I could have created for that circumstance.”

This was an extremely tall-task.

The human mind did not make decisions that were objectively the best because the human mind was not able to discern what was the objectively best option. The mind was subjective, emotional, irrational, and sometimes just stupid.

Rui may be intelligent, however, he knew that he was not above making the wrong choice due to subconscious biases. He was willing to rely on experience, intuition, and instinct for replacing the adaptive evolution model of the VOID algorithm, but that was because speed was more important than accuracy when it came to a split-second decision.

However, the creation of a technique was not strictly limited to a split-second decision, thus accuracy was more important.

How could he figure out what technique, that was within his ability to create, was most antithetical to his opponent?

“I could go the darwinian route,” Rui realized. “Rely on evolution by natural selection.”

This would amount to deploying the best possible technique he could think of against his opponent while simultaneously creating many variations that he would use in rapid succession.

The variation that performed the best would be the one that he would select before creating several more variations of that selected variation and repeating the process again.

Eventually, he would end up with a technique that was highly evolved to be adaptive to his opponent. It lived up to his Martial Path.

But, unfortunately, it wasn’t good enough for him. “Darwinian evolution is imperfect.” Rui shook his head. “It only chooses the best among a handful of possibilities out of all. I need something more powerful and potent than Darwinian evolution.”

And that was what when the answer hit him. “…I could map out all possibilities and simulate the outcome of each possible technique that I could possibly create to then objectively arrive at the most optimal antithetical technique.”

This was a tall order, even for Rui. It was still very much within his cognitive capacity, of course. However it would shape up to be one of the most heavy systems of thought in his Martial Mind.

The outcome was very much worth it, however.

“Easier said than done,” Rui huffed. “I’m going to need to not just simulate how the technique  interacts with my opponent but also with the rest of my Martial Art.”

After all, if a technique was perfectly antithetical to his opponent in a vacuum, but had poor compatibility with the VOID algorithm, his other systems of thought, and technique systems, then it would end up performing extremely poorly.

“Then there’s the matter of how this system of thought will interact with the Yggdrasil System.”

The Yggdrasil System also adaptively evolved to his opponents, like all his systems did. It was able to decipher what was the most antithetical environment to his opponent based on evolutionary evaluations.

There was an overlap and thus a conflict between the Tree of Life predictive model and this new technique-creation system of thought.

“…This new technique creation system of thought needs to include all of this and take it into account,” Rui realized. “It needs to input variables such as the VOID algorithm, SOUL System, and the Tree of Life and make a decision based on that.”

Against beasts and monsters, domains were the most optimal for antithetical adaptive evolution. Thus, any technique he would create with this hypothetical technique-creation system of thought was going to be a domain, one that would be decided by the Tree of Life System of thought.

He needed to ensure that the protocols of this new system of thought were flexible enough to smoothly integrate into his Martial Art without conflicting with it. “So to sum up, the system of thought needs to simulate each possible technique and not only objectively measure which possible technique is most antithetical to my opponent while taking into account not just them and the environment, but also my Martial Body and Art.”

It was a truly ambitious system of thought when he summed up his model for the new system of thought. “For one, I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to objectively measure how antithetical a technique is.”

Antitheticality was not an empirical or even a theoretical parameter.

It was a vague and ambiguous concept.

Thankfully, Rui had given a lot of thought about what his Martial Path meant in a scientific context.

“In the context of Project Water, it means maximizing the probability of victory in any given circumstance against any given opponent.”

Thus, antitheticality was simply probability distribution. He would need to measure what possible technique, what possible permutation and combination of actions, had the highest probability of victory. “It won’t be easy, but I will need to flesh out exactly how I’m going to increase the probability of victory,” Rui mused. “Most likely, it will be some sort of mathematical parameter inferred from empirical data derived from a hybrid combination of bayesian probability and frequentist probability.”

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