The complicated nature of professional sumo wrestling

 

Sumo is the national sport of Japan. Despite what someone who has never really seen much of it and has very little knowledge about it might hastily think, it's a highly technical form of wrestling that requires enormous amounts of strength and highly polished technique. It doesn't matter how big, heavy and strong you are, if you don't have the technique you will be on the ground very quickly.

Professional sumo wrestlers in Japan, ie. rikishi, go through grueling training, usually 5 to 6 hours of hard training every single day, to build up strength, stamina and technique. All professional rikishi in Japan belong to an official sumo stable (a "sumo school" or "private sumo club" of sorts). Professional sumo is divided into six divisions, and all rikishi from division 6 to division 3 are mandated by their stable to live within the premises of the stable, where they get accommodation, food and a small allowance for daily expenses, and where they have to train every day, five to six hours a day minimum. It is, actually a very hard and grueling life. And it's pretty much their entire life, if they want to continue being professional sumo wrestlers.

The good

So why go through all this? What motivates people to enlist in these sumo stables?

For starters, sumo in Japan is extremely prestigious. Its history goes back literally centuries and it's extremely rich in culture, customs and traditions, both secular and practical, as well as religious (the entire sport being deeply rooted in Shintoism, and full of Shintoist beliefs, practices and traditions.)

All rikishi are considered celebrities of sorts in Japan. Obviously the higher-ranked you are, the more of a celebrity. There is great prestige in the job. Sumo tournaments are watched by thousands in the arena itself and millions through TV, and rikishi are admired and respected, and they often get all kinds of side gigs in all kinds of events.

Of course the job itself is a very stable form of livelihood: The professional rikishi are provided with accommodation and food at no expense of their own, plus a small allowance for daily expenses if in divisions 6-to-3. If a rikishi manages to climb to division 2 or better, it comes with a big amount of perks, including an actual sizeable salary and freedom to live wherever he wants (ie. he can either keep living at the stable, at no extra expense, or choose to move to live somewhere else, as long as he is available for daily training of course.) Needless to say, rikishi in division 2 and especially the highest division, division 1, are the most famous national celebrities and get the most admiration and most gigs.

This actually causes for bouts in divisions 3 and 2 to be extraordinarily fierce: Everybody in division 3 is trying to climb to division 2 and get all the perks that come with it, while everybody in division 2 is desperately trying to avoid dropping back to division 3. While quite obviously division 1 bouts are the most prestigious, it's the two next divisions that tend to have the most fierce, brutal and spectacular fights, with everybody desperately trying to avoid division 3.

There's also a strong sense of camaraderie within a stable: All the rikishi living in a stable have a strong common culture, and they usually are very close friends with each other, and have a lot of trust in each other, and everybody is there to support everybody else.

From the point of view of the wider public, rikishi are generally seen as "gentle giants" of sorts. While in the ring the fights can be absolutely brutal, outside the ring they are known for being very friendly, calm, polite, and role models to look up to, and they are often called to events, TV shows, schools, and other places, where they are usually treated like celebrities (especially if they are in the highest divisions.) In fact, rikishi are officially forbidden from participating in any fights or altercations outside the ring (such as for example a bar fight). Breaking this rule may result in sanctions and even expulsion.

The bad

Sumo wrestlers tend to be morbidly obese. It's not a requirement for them to gain weight, but you'll have a very hard time having any success if you don't, because the weight is an obvious advantage in wrestling. There have only been a handful of rikishi during the last 50 or so years that have weighed under 120 kg and have reached the salary divisions (ie. division 2 or 1.) It's not impossible, and there are examples (most notoriously Enhō Yūya, who is very short and weighed less than 100 kg when he reached division 1), but it requires extreme strength and skill to pull off, so much so that extremely few people have ever succeeded.

Even though rikishi tend to be very trained and very strong, morbid obesity tends to cause all kinds of problems regardless. No matter how well trained and how strong you are, no matter how strong your muscles and tendons are, the enormous weight puts a lot of strain on joints and ligaments. Not only do rikishi often have mobility problems (eg. good luck trying to run a 100m sprint, or even climbing a set of stairs), but injuries are extremely common.

Indeed, injuries are almost guaranteed in professional sumo. They almost come as an expected job hazard. Not only are the wrestlers severely overweight, putting extra strain on their joints and ligaments, and also making falls all the more dangerous (as bone fractures become more likely), but the wrestling itself tends to be extremely brutal, with very few restrictions on what can and cannot be done, which in itself increases the likelihood of injuries significantly.

If you watch any amount of professional Japanese sumo, you'll notice that at least half of the rikishi will be wearing some kind of bandages, supports and tapes, to either try to protect themselves from injury, or more commonly because of an injury that they are still recovering from.

In fact, by far the most common reason for a rikishi to fall to lower divisions is because of injuries. Professional tournaments do not give any concessions for injuries. If you don't participate, you lose by default, and thus can drop to a lower division if it happens enough times. There have been even cases of rikishi from division 1 dropping all the way to division 5 because of a severe enough injury that kept them from tournaments for a very long time. It's all an uphill battle from there (especially if the injury is of the sort that never really heals fully.)

Dropping from division 2 to division 3 is a major blow to the life of a wrestler. He will be once again obligated to move to live in the stable (if he was living in his own home), and he will not receive a salary anymore, instead just getting the small allowance. There's also numerous other perks of divisions 2 and 1 that are not given to the lower divisions, and thus lost if dropping to division 3 or lower. If a rikishi refuses to move to the stable, it may result in sanctions and even expulsion, ending his career, and potentially causing public shame. Many a rikishi in the two highest divisions has retired early because of injuries, before he drops to the lower divisions. After all, it's better to end in a high than either suffer the loss of perks or reputation by being expelled because of not complying with the rules.

The ugly

One thing I have not mentioned about the limitations of divisions 3-6 and the perks of divisions 1 and 2: That of marriage.

You see, rikishi in divisions 3-6 are not only obligated to live in the premises of the stable, but they are forbidden from getting married, or having any romantic relationships of the sort. One of the huge perks of getting to division 2 is that this restriction is dropped, and the rikishi is freely allowed to marry and move to his own home.

However, if he does that, dropping back to division 3 is even more of a huge blow: While such a rikishi is allowed to remain married (even the stables aren't that cruel), he will essentially stop being able to provide for his family because his salary will stop, and the small allowance of division 3 is not even close to enough. This can cause huge problems for that family, especially in Japan. And, indeed, early retirements due to injuries that put the wrestler in danger of dropping to division 3 are most common when said wrestler is married.

There's also an unhealthy attitude towards injuries. For the longest time, and to a large extent even to this day, if a rikishi gets injured on the ring, especially if it's during a tournament, he is supposed to just "toughen up" and walk out on his own, regardless of how bad the injury is. For the longest time there wasn't even any medical staff present in the vicinity to help him. This no doubt has worsened the severity of injuries many, many times. Only very recently (less than 10 years go) were the rules changed so that medical personnel are present at the events and a wrestler could be carried out in a wheelchair or stretcher if he was unable to walk, or even get direct medical help right there besides the ring if the injury is extreme.

But that's not even the ugliest part of professional sumo culture.

You see, even though there's a strong sense of camaraderie among the members of a sumo stable, there's still likewise a very strong pecking order: Those in higher divisions have more perks than those in lower divisions, and the former can often boss the latter around as they wish. There are all kinds of daily chores and tasks that need to be done in the premises of a stable, and the more disgusting chores (such as cleaning an outhouse) are rather obviously given to the members of the lowest divisions. In fact, part of the in-stable sumo culture is a form of hazing and bullying (the extents of which depends highly in the particular stable and its internal culture.) The members of the highest divisions may come up with disgusting tasks for the members of the lowest divisions just for the sake of it. This is generally considered part of the training itself, a form of "toughening up" the newcomers, and also a sort of perk for raising up in the ranks. Some of the hazing stories at the worst stables are just horrendous.

The most common misconception about Amelia Earhart

Ask pretty much anybody who Amelia Earhart was, and if that somebody knows the name, there's at least a 99% chance that they will respond that she was the first woman who tried a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean, who famously disappeared during that flight, never to be found. Some of them might say it was the Atlantic Ocean, but anyway, some kind of ocean.

And chances are that if you read the above, you didn't even bat an eye at the most egregious mistake stated there.

And what would that mistake be? The claim that it was a "solo" flight.

Indeed, for some reason there's an extremely common misconception that the vast, vast majority of people who have heard of the story of Amelia Earhart believe, that she was flying solo. That it was the first attempt by a woman at crossing the ocean as a solo flight.

But the fact is that it wasn't a solo flight. She had a copilot. A copilot that pretty much nobody remembers. Even from the absolutely microscopic minority of people who happen to know she wasn't flying solo, most of them couldn't tell his name. He is, perhaps, one of the most forgotten people in the history of humanity who was involved in a world-famous historical incident. His name was Fred Noonan.

Sometimes even "star programmers" might not be so "stellar"

I once worked for a small gaming company. One of the lead programmers there was what could be called a "star" coder. A hacker. Not only had he implemented several dozen games in the company, but he was a regular in all kinds of video game "hackatons" (ie. competitions where small groups of developers create a video game in a day or two), and was quite famous not only among those circles but among other indie gaming companies here as well. Needless to say everybody in the company considered him not only a stellar coder, but outright crucial to the survival of the company.

There's a saying that goes like "never meet your heroes", which means that when you admire a celebrity or someone you don't personally know, if you ever were to get to actually know that person it may well reveal personality or other flaws that greatly mar your admiration.

In this case the saying could be adapted as "never look at the star programmer's code".

There are admired stellar programmers who genuinely write extremely good well-written code, who know what they are doing, who have an extremely good understanding of algorithms and programming techniques, both from the theoretical and the practical point of view.

Then there are "stellar" programmers who... let's say, only give the appearance of being so. They might be very prolific and produce impressive-looking results, but if you delve into what they have written and what their actual knowledge is, it might be less than impressive.

You see, even though we worked for the same company, we were doing completely separate projects and never worked on the same project, so I never got to see his code. With the exception of one time, where I briefly participated in the development of one particular game.

Turned out that this "stellar" programmer with his impressive resume... wasn't one of the best programmers I have ever met. Sure, he could write code, and he knew the programming languages he was using, but I quickly noticed how poor his understanding of many programming related concepts and algorithms was.

As an example, in that project there was a need for a random number generator and because of the programming language only floating point numbers were available. He had implemented an extremely poor-quality Lehmer RNG. When I checked what the period of the generator was, it was in the thousands. I'm not kidding. His RNG went through a few thousands of values before it started repeating.

When I mentioned this to him, he had no idea what I was talking about. He had literally no understanding of even the basics of random number generation, and had never even thought about things like the period of an RNG. He had never tested what the period of his RNG was, or in any way checked its quality. He was lucky that it just happened to not give egregiously obvious poor quality to the player of the game.

I suggested I implement a slightly better  32-bit LCG. While the quality of LCGs is also not brilliant, at least the period could be pumped from the few thousands to over 4 billion (and the quality can be somewhat improved by mixing up the higher bits with the lower bits.) However, to implement this 32-bit LCG when 32-bit floating points are the only numerical data type available required a bit of ingenuity.

Ingenuity that, as it turns out, he absolutely did not have. Not only did he have no idea what an LCG was, he had no ideas whatsoever about how to implement 32-bit integer arithmetic using 32-bit floats. When I explained to him how to do 32-bit multiplication using 16-bit integers (as floats can be used to handle 16-bit integers just fine) using the classical long multiplication algorithm, he had no idea what I was talking about.

This guy, who had gone to school as normal, had no idea how long multiplication works. And apparently wasn't even very interested when I tried to explain it to him. I don't know which was more appalling, his lack of knowledge, or his lack of interest.

Yeah. Never meet your heroes, nor read their code.

My prediction on PS5 Pro sales numbers

As of writing this blog post, September of 2024, Sony has recently announced their upgrade to the original PlayStation 5, the PlayStation 5 Pro.

The announcement was met with less than enthusiastic responses, primarily because of the announced launch prices, which most people don't see as being in any way justified by the less-than-impressive hardware improvements and lack of a disc drive. (The announcement did not mention a version of the console with one at all.)

The announced launch price of the console was US$700 / £700 / €800.

Contrast this with the launch price of the original disc-driveless PS5, US$399 / £359 / €399.

The jump in price is very significant, while the announced improvements in hardware are very moderate at best, with an announced 45% increased GPU performance, and almost no performance improvement in CPU nor RAM speed. Sony's presentation claimed an improvement of about 100% in hardware raytracing performance (ie. about double), but this is less than impressive taking into account the fact that the number of PS5 games supporting raytracing is abysmal (and even in most of those the visual improvements are not very notable.)

I am making the prediction here, in September of 2024, that the PS5 Pro will sell relatively poorly. Not abysmally poorly, but still quite significantly so (unless Sony changes something drastically to improve the situation.)

The original PS5 has sold approximately 60 million units as of writing this post.

I predict that, if the console is sold as it was announced, for its announced launch price, and Sony doesn't do anything to significantly improve the situation, the PS5 Pro will sell about one tenth of that, ie. less than 10 million units. Perhaps even significantly less (5 million or less.)

Existing PS5 users have little incentive to upgrade. Some definitely will (because there are always so-called "whales" who want the latest and best, and don't care about price), but only a small fraction.

People who will be buying the PS5 for the first time will have two choices, one costing almost double that of the other, and either via research or word-of-mouth they will probably know that the more expensive version does not really provide improvements significant enough to pay double the price, so they are likely to choose the cheaper option.

So, in summary, my prediction is that the PS5 Pro will sell about 5-10 million units in total, if sold as announced and Sony doesn't change things significantly. This compared to the 60 million base PS5 units sold.

One of the funniest misconceptions often still taught today

Especially in certain countries (which isn't surprising because the spread of misconceptions is strongly tied to local word-of-mouth culture and customs) even to this day it is taught that a person loses most of their body heat through the head. Sometimes no exact figure is given, but when it is given, 80% seems strangely common. This is supposed to teach how important it is to wear a hat during cold weather, especially in sub-zero temperatures. It's also commonly repeated as a factoid even in other situations.

As you might have guessed, this is just a myth. In reality a person loses about 10% of their body heat through the head. Which isn't surprising because the surface of the head comprises about 10% of the total surface of the entire body. Which, of course, means that there's nothing special about the head compared to the rest of the body in this regard.

The interesting part is where this myth originates.

The most plausible origin of the myth is an experiment and study made by the United States military some time in the earlier-20th century. In this experiment they tested how much body heat is lost by military personnel wearing arctic suits in sub-zero temperatures. They measured that from all the body heat emitted by the soldier's body, about 45% was emitted from the head.

Which, of course, is a lot higher than 10%. Not nearly as high as the often-cited 80% figure, but still significantly higher.

The figure, however, starts making sense once you realize that when the test was performed, the army arctic suit didn't have any sort of warm headgear, so the soldiers were either not wearing any headgear at all, or only a helmet, which obviously provides very little protection against heat loss.

The 45% figure happens when wearing thick winter clothes without headgear. It doesn't indicate how much a naked person loses heat from their head.

And even then, it's just 45%, not the often-cited 80%.

As a result of this study the military started issuing warm protective headgear alongside the rest of the arctic suit. And, somehow, this result got widespread among the general public and changed via word of mouth until it reached the modern misconception.

How do some (software) projects become vaporware?

"Vaporware" is a term generally used for a project that's announced by a company, which then takes an inordinate amount of time to complete, and might in fact never be completed even though years and years, sometimes decades, are spent on developing it. Sometimes the project does eventually end up being released; however, most often than not it turns out to be less than stellar, sub-par to various degrees, and gets critically panned and disliked. Very often this is because, probably due to its extremely long development time, its technology is antiquated by the time it gets published and may still contain a lot of missing or buggy features (no doubt having not been completely finished for the exact same reasons it was so immensely delayed in the first place.)

Hidden behind the layer of publicly announced "vaporware" is, however, an immensely bigger layer of what could be called "eternal projects". These are projects that have gone over any reasonable timelines by an order of magnitude, but which have never been announced publicly by the company (most likely because the company only wants to announce finished products, not future projects.) These are, essentially, "company-internal vaporware", normal vaporware, just not announced in advance to the public.

Projects (software and otherwise) that go nowhere are extremely commonplace in all kinds of technology companies. Someone presents an idea, development is started, but it turns out that for one reason or another the idea is actually infeasible, or would take way too much time and resources, or in practice isn't as good as it sounded on paper, so it's abandoned. Usually in the timespan of a few months, a year at most.

However, these "eternal projects", "company-internal vaporware" projects, may be developed for years and years and years, sometimes even for over a decade, with no end in sight, even though it never seems to be even close to be finished, nor usable in practice, or something that actually feels like a good full video game (if the project is one). Rather than being cancelled after a few months, they are just stubbornly continued for many years, even though it never seems to get even close to finished.

But why? And how does a project become this kind of "eternal project" (either publicly announced or unannounced)? Why don't companies just cancel such projects when it has become clear that they aren't really going anywhere?

Having had some personal experience with these things, I can speculate from my perspective about some of the reasons.

One of the major, perhaps most obvious, reasons is the sunk cost fallacy: People managing and running the project (and, in my experience, it most usually tends to be them, rather than the developers and engineers themselves) get into the strong mentality that the project actually is going somewhere, that a finished product is just around the corner, it just needs a little bit more of work, and it will finally be finished, the final breakthrough in the project will be achieved, and the finishing touches will be routine and smooth sailing from that point forward. And, of course, where the "sunk cost fallacy" kicks in is that they have this strong feeling that because so many years and so much money have already been spent on the project, it would be a huge loss and an enormous waste to just stop and cancel the project. The team has spent all this time, all this effort, all this work, and there is years and years worth of material that has been produced by the team, and they are so close to finally get a working result, that it would be unthinkable to throw all that work, effort and money to the trashcan.

These managers, however, often get blindsided and can't see that the project actually isn't going anywhere, and the existing work is just outright bad, and that the project should have been cancelled literally years prior and all the developers and engineers moved to some other more productive projects. The developers themselves can often see this, but they either don't really want to say anything, or of they do, their objections are dismissed.

But how does a project, like a software project, end up in this state? A state of being, effectively, eternally "stuck" in a state where it's seemingly being constantly developed but it's getting nowhere, it's not actually advancing towards a final product?

There may be many reasons for this, but one common one is a lack of a plan, a very exact vision of what the final product must be like, planned before development even started. In other words, the project started as a more generic idea and took the approach of "let's plan the details as we go". For example if the project is a video game, the plan might have been to create a game of a particular genre, with certain features... but that's it. All the actual concrete details are made up during development, "as we go." There is no precise and exact final picture of the end goal.

This usually ends up in a form of development where the development itself is used as a testing bed for ideas and features. The person or people running the project may come up with new features to try, new ideas, new mechanics, to be tested on the project currently in development, to see if they work. These new ideas might literally come on an almost daily basis. "Let's try this. Let's try that. Let's change this into that. Let's add this to that. Let's remove this. Let's re-add this previous removed feature." An endless stream of new features and changes to the existing project, which just accumulate and accumulate over the years, but without any concrete vision nor plan of the final product.

One reason why a project manager may engage in this is that he completely misunderstood what the "agile development" paradigm actually means and entails. (Yes, actual case from personal experience.)

Such a project manager might get completely blindsided and, ironically, completely unable to see the bigger picture. The fact that the project isn't actually going anywhere, and is nowhere even near to be finished, and that the current project is in complete shambles, a complete mess, when it comes to an actual good design, and for example if it's a video game, it's not anything that anybody would play or enjoy.

Bosses, CEO's and other higher-ups might also be blindsided by the project. Perhaps they are presented previews of the product, which present a picture of it that looks way better than what it actually is. Company-internal deceptive marketing of sorts. The higher-ups might seriously get the wrong impression that the product is better and more finished than it really is, and thus not stop it.

Or, in many cases, it's precisely the bosses and CEO's who are the ones engaging in the endless cycle of trying new features without a clear plan nor goal of the end product, unable to see that the project is a complete disaster and should have been cancelled years prior.

Why too much exposition ruins movies and games

Many years ago I went a couple of times to an event organized by some university student group where you could be introduced to and play all kinds of tabletop board games. I thought it would be a good way to have fun and socialize, and perhaps even find interesting tabletop games.

One of the organizers there, however, pretty much ruined the entire thing for me. The reason for it was that it seemed like he just loved the sound of his own voice, and when he started introducing some new board game to a small group of interested players, he would just explain... and explain... and explain... and explain... and explain... endlessly. He would literally take like 15 minutes explaining and explaining some board game (that wasn't actually even all that hugely complicated; it's not like it was Warhammer or some other enormously complex game.) Rather than, you know, actually allowing people to learn by playing.

The problem was, of course, that such a huge info dump is impossible to follow and remember. It's completely useless to explain a complex board game for fifteen minutes because no person in existence can remember all of that at once, especially when they have absolutely no experience with the game itself, no context, and all they hear are words and more words disconnected from any actual hands-on playing experience. Thus, I would just doze off after a minute or two, and listen to the huge stream of meaningless word salad for 10+ minutes, completely bored out of my skull. Those 15 minutes could have been used to actually play the game and learn the concepts in that manner, one by one as they come up during the game. After what felt like an absolute eternity the game would finally be started, and almost nothing of what he explained helped at all to play the game, because nobody can remember all of that. It was literally completely wasted 15 minutes for absolutely no benefit. We would learn from the first 5 minutes of actually playing the game way more than during that 15-minute verbal diarrhea info dump.

Way too many video games, especially nowadays, commit this exact same mistake: Quite often during the very beginning parts of the game, before the player has had any chance of getting any hands-on experience about the game, it will throw textbox tutorial after textbox tutorial at the player, usually interrupting gameplay, and way too often either explaining complete trivialities, or showing an info dump that the player has zero chance of learning because there's too much information at once, completely disconnected from any actual hands-on playing experience (and thus the player has no way of connecting what the tutorial is saying to the actual gameplay, making it harder to remember.)

(When it comes to explaining completely trivial things, which is way too common especially in a certain type of Japanese RPG games, it almost feels like the developers have the mentality of "we went through all this trouble to implement a tutorial system, let's use it to the fullest, dammit!" and start throwing the most trivial things at the player, like how to click on a button or exit from a menu, which would be completely obvious to anybody without it having to be explained.)

Sometimes, however, this kind of needless exposition and explanations can also extend to storytelling itself, which thus can affect not only video games but also movies, TV series and even books.

Movies, especially those that are based on stories originally told in another medium (usually a book or a game), tend to be especially egregious in this regard.

One particularly notorious and aggravating example is the 2021 film adaptation of Dune.

The opening scene of the book doesn't happen until about 20 minutes into the movie. The first 20 minutes are nothing but boring exposition.

This is not how you tell a story! Frank Herbert, when he wrote the book, understood how to tell a story in an interesting manner, in a way that immediately engages the audience. You start with something that grabs your attention, picks your curiosity, excites your imagination.

You don't start with 20 minutes of exposition!

Clearly the scriptwriters of the movie did not understand this at all, and felt the average audience is so stupid that they need 20 minutes of exposition before they can "understand" what's going on. They apparently felt that if they just did what the book did, then the audience wouldn't understand and would be confused. They clearly didn't understand about good writing at all.

And this is, by far, not the only example, just one of the most egregious recent ones.