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A Real Life Off-by-One Error

https://leejo.github.io/2024/09/01/off_by_one/
Not an off-by-one error—at least not in spirit. Interesting nonetheless.

I expected the article to eventually answer this puzzle:

> The competition started and got through a number of rounds. There were some comments about how the climber on the left always won.

Near the end:

> The kicker is that the out of place hold hasn’t been used in a long time. The climbers have optimised their route such that it is skipped. The same happens to the fourth hold from the bottom. So either being in the wrong place is immaterial to the climbers’ technique as long as they don’t get in the way.

So it seems like the error discovered by the article author should not have conferred any advantage to the climber on the left.

Anyone who can shine light on this matter?

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>Not an off-by-one error—at least not in spirit. Interesting nonetheless.

Literally it was an off-by-one error. Literally, literal meaning.

I think the poster meant off-by-one doesn’t simply mean a plus or minus one error, like mispricing a $5.99 as $6.99, but instead must be born out of confusion as to whether an origin point is marked as a 1 or as a 0.
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It may not be a fencepost error, but I think it's still off by one.
Even if the out of place hold were used, would you then conclude it to be causal? I still wouldn't rule out coincidence. Many discoveries happen as a result of investigating spurious patterns.

Also the author rules out psychology, but I wouldn't, especially since there were multiple confirmed errors in the route preparation, which I expect could reduce one's trust in the fairness of the competition. In the moment, I might start to wonder, "If one hold was out of place, why not more? Is anyone even checking this?" even if untrue / unlikely.

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If you cross your eyes and look at the routes as if it were a single stereoscopic image overlaying one route on top of each other, the misplaced hold jumps out at you immediately.
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I just did it and it didn't jump out for me at all. Odd
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It's so weird ! The badly placed hold just disappears once all the rests aligns. My brain seems to dismiss it as an error on its part
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That's a fantastic find. I imagine some standard CV tool can spot this since the holds are grid-aligned. We should probably have something like that. It's crazy how good human pattern-recognition can get when trained on things. What a spot by you.

Also, by the way, where is the photo on your about page: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/60f40aa1942bba...

I feel like it's Crater Lake, Oregon, but considering where you live it's probably somewhere in Switzerland. Looks lovely.

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It is Crater Lake, from a second visit this summer.
> Maybe when the record is unbeaten for more than a couple of years they should throw it all away and start with a brand new route?

There's been some discussion of having new speed routes every few years. I think this would make the event a thousand times more interesting. That said, I'm still not sure I'd be interested.

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There's a misconception that a quadrennial sports festival. Actually, they're a quadrennial festival for people who never cared about the sport before to explain how it should be fixed.
It would be terrible from an athlete perspective
How about birthdays? When you turn "1" it's your second birthday. Or counting three seconds. Start counting zero..one..two..three.
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Jewish law sometimes counts from 1 instead of 0 for birthdays, so a newborn is not 0 years old, they are in their 1st year. (But it's written as "when they are 1", so you have to know which counting method is being used.)
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Korea has a system similar to this. You start at age 1 and get one year older each New Year's Day. https://www.90daykorean.com/korean-age-all-about-age-in-kore...
They changed the system last year after using it for many years (+/-1).

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/6/28/why-are-south-k...

Seems bizarre to keep the same wall config for all of time. The sport becomes about muscle memory more than anything else. The competitors can literally turn off their conscious brain. It would seem to me, it would be more exciting as a spectator and competitor if they had to problem solve on their way up there. Records could be less about best times and more about how many rounds did someone win in a row or something.

They could even still incorporate the one standardized wall config as a speed round once in a while or integrate it into the competition in some other way.

> Seems bizarre to keep the same wall config for all of time. The sport becomes about muscle memory more than anything else.

Plenty of other sport are pretty much the same each time, particularly track and field.

Exactly, I don't understand people who watch any of the tracl and field disciplines and complain about this wall being the same everytime. Like there's about 10 different disciplines of people running on a plain track and that's fine but people climbing the same wall isn't. I totally get that you might find lead or bouldering more interesting but that's not the point.
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> Also, maybe in future someone will optimise the route using that currently unused hold four down from the top?

This reminds me a lot of how Brood War meta changes as new 'bugs' are discovered, since the fandom loves the game without it ever being touched so when edge cases are discovered they become part of the game rather than something to be fixed.

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https://www.formulanon.com/movement/mrhp8j3hijw97sdl1krno2el...
If you're curious about those, they're all photos of the various sporting events that happen in the village here. All the effects you see are captured in camera through movements or otherwise.
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