Complex Systems in Sport, International Congress: Linking Theory and Practice

Abstract

Collective sports comprise of cooperative and competitive organizational processes in which players have to be predictable for teammates and sufficiently diverse and unpredictable for opponents in order to satisfy the goal constraints. In highly stable, repetitive and thus predictable (cooperative or non-cooperative) environments the adaptive system may converge to a minimum unpredictability by minimizing the diversity of accessible patterns of functional behaviour. However, sport competition, akin to life itself, is not a highly stable and repetitive process based on negotiating stable environment. It creates conditions where highly demanding non-cooperative behaviour of the environment is rather rule than an exception. In such stochastically changing and non-cooperative environments, systems (players and teams) must develop high behavioural unpredictability potential to increase their fitness to the competitive environment. This means that the adaptation process rests on a tendency of permanent increase of the unpredictability potential which affords the ultimate goal, the survival (winning) of the system in sports environments. This state of affairs suggests that performance may be conceptualized in terms of unpredictability/diversity potential and that its development can be understood by the juxtaposition of three principles of adaptive systems: (a) relativity of organism-environment unpredictability; (b) satisficing diversity/unpredictability potential; and (c) tendency towards non-decreasing unpredictability/diversity. (a) Relativity of organism-environment unpredictability: Collective sports adaptation is a process of becoming fit to one's environment. Becoming fit means that the environment becomes more informative and less constraining for the player/ team and, on the other hand, the player/team becomes less informative, and thus more unpredictable for the environment. The relativity of organism-environment unpredictability is based on the conservation of bio-motor information principle (Hristovski, 1989). This principle says that performance variables, including motor abilities (effectivities), such as power, agility, speed, strength, endurance, etc., may be treated as entropy measures forming a state space in which training induces conversion of entropy into information. By increasing the effectivities,

Application of a continuous pressure metric for Australian football

“…This suggests that defending players are well placed to cover large portions of the field, increasing the difficulty on the ball carrier in finding open space around a passing target. Indeed, in AF there is a tendency for players to favour targets with lower density (Spencer et al, 2017). It may also be partially explained by the tactical constraints which shape decision-making by players (Pill, 2014).…”

“…As spatiotemporal data pertaining to players is available in elite AF (with the exclusion of opposition data) there are opportunities to utilize it to improve the sophistication of existing pressure measurements. Thus, a measure of player density was recently developed by applying Gaussian mixture modelling to spatiotemporal datasets during match play (Spencer et al, 2017). This method captured the interaction of all players on the field simultaneously.…”

“…This method captured the interaction of all players on the field simultaneously. The work highlighted the changing congestion of players throughout a match, revealing that successful possession chains have large changes in density (Spencer et al, 2017). An adaptation of this type of analysis may provide a valuable metric to improve upon the current measures of pressure by providing a continuous metric.…”

“…The present study seeks to adapt the methodology of Spencer et al (2017) to use density estimation as a proxy for pressure in AF. The first aim was to determine the extent of the relationship between pressure and the effectiveness of skill involvements.…”

Metastable Coordination Dynamics of Collaborative Creativity in Educational Settings

“…To coordinate with themselves, with others, or with the environment, living systems form synergies, which are functional groupings of elements that are temporarily constrained to act as a single coherent unit. Components interact to form synergies and those synergies, in turn, govern the components' behavior [31,32]. A complementary view is that the parts become differentiated via a process of intraaction within the wholistic synergy itself.…”