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?

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.

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.

> 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.

How about birthdays? When you turn "1" it's your second birthday. Or counting three seconds. Start counting zero..one..two..three.

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.

> 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.