
Algorithm of the Take – How a Slick Foundation Hides Intangible Skills
What is a Take? In disc dog we do this thing called a Take – a Take is a “throw” made to the dog that
What is a Take? In disc dog we do this thing called a Take – a Take is a “throw” made to the dog that
King has been through this drill a few times, but we’ve been focused on Team Movement and his disc mauling problem. Breaking out the new guy and Epic to demonstrate some Trigger and Wait work provided a great opportunity to revisit this critical skill for this studly young man.
Ron & Soda Pop use the Flatwork Compass to install the Wait behavior and a reliable Trigger for action.
Ron & Epic demonstrate our standard Triggers for a catch, a Bite, flips, overs – and all of those skills are Triggered with the same mechanic.
Kris & Otto work the Flatwork Compass in preparation for their first Fly Chi Flow form. The Flatwork Compass features prominently in Team Movement as a traffic signal of sorts for larger scale play and transitions from the Big Game of long throws and flatwork patterns and the Inside Game with the dog on top of the handler.
This is session 2 of Wait vs Stay via the Back Stall with Motown that took place a couple of minutes after session 1. In this session Motown is more calm and thoughtful and displays a bit more drive and much less arousal. We’ll be building on the stuff we covered in session 1 in this second of 4 sessions.
Passing can happen actively or passively. The Crossing Pass allows the handler to handle the dog into the pass, setting the dog’s line and creating a trigger to start the maneuver from a Team Movement perspective.
DiscDog Bitework is an amazing, low impact exercise for puppies of all ages. In addition to teaching the basic mechanics of the game: Bite, Drop, and Give, bitework can deliver many important details and ancillary behaviors of working dogs.
Bitework is a tremendous exercise for teaching dogs to play disc. Bite, Drop, Give, Drive Management, Patience, Position, and catching can all be taught and reinforced using a thoughtful game of Bitework. Ron & Wham! work some Bitework and demonstrate some of the basic functions of the game.
For a long time I’ve been wanting to do Jakies in both directions. A Jakie is a move where the dog leaps to catch the disc then rebounds off the body. It’s essentially a frontside rebound if you think of the move as a vault. Frontside means the catch happens before the standard move…
Proper cuing is critical for successful disc dog performance. Issues with cuing and the resultant communication problems are, perhaps, the most common mistakes handlers make and the most common impediments to successful performance in all aspects of disc dog freestyle and disc dog games.
Jack and Wham! work on some disc dog puppy bitework on the big field at the Fahle Ranch.The focus of this session is keeping this young frisbee phenom on task and engaged and to develop and reinforce basic disc dog mechanics: Bite, Drop, and Give. Rollers are thrown in for action and variety. Wham! is a 16 week old Aussie.
Disc Dog Bitework is a great way to teach the mechanics of disc play: Bite, Drop, and Give. Each of these skills is integral to the game of disc with a dog whether you’re playing freestyle or focused on disc dog games. Ron & Grasshopper work a little bitework in this short session with a focus on drawing attention to the Bite and Drop criteria and the trigger for a Bite.
Tell, Trigger, Target is the disc dog vault sequence. Tell the dog where the disc will be caught and what type of vault is to be done, Trigger the dog’s movement with the presentation of the vaulting platform, and set the Target. It is your job to deliver this information so the dog leaves the ground knowing these three pieces of critical intelligence.
Vaulting a Disc Dog is a complicated process. We break this complex process down into 3 basic functions – Tell | Trigger | Target. We have already covered the Tell function in an earlier DiscDogger Weekly. After you Tell the dog what we are going to do and where we are going to do it, then we Trigger the skill. We have covered the Trigger skill here on the blog in various places.
12 throws in 4 minutes and we have a dramatically improved trigger, a better wait, and a plan to solve a couple of other nagging problems he has shown throughout his career. A few dedicated sessions and we should have marked improvement in all aspects of his game.
Disc Dogs who know the difference between a Flank and a Pass are easier to handle. Handlers who know the difference between a Flank and a Pass are better at moving their dogs and making plays. A team that knows the difference between a Flank and a Pass exhibit diverse play and are more capable of purposing play towards training and performance.
The handler’s job is not to hit a moving target. Hitting the moving target is the dog’s job. The handler’s job is to give the dog a clue, tell the dog when to go, and put the target where it needs to be – Tell > Trigger > Target.
PATRONS ONLY – SNEAK PEEK…
Here’s a sample of the first part of the Accelerator module in the Disc Dog 0-60 Project. It’s talking about the Trigger for action.
An illustrated discussion of Intercepting the Release with disc dog flatwork by Ron Watson of Pawsitive Vybe.
In disc dog we do this thing called a Take - a Take is a "throw" made to the dog that is not thrown at all - the disc is simply held in the hand and the dog takes it from the handler. This is a training tool, a very useful one, but something that does not score in competitions. A take is not a throw in competition, but it is a goto method for teaching vaults (dog leaping off the body) and should be a last ditch move for teaching a dog to flip, but many people have started to use the Take for flips as foundation.
Limiting the difficulty of these key elements of a vault is important and useful you need the simplicity for training and learning, but this hides many intangible skills and completely eliminates the two most important aspects of playing discs with dogs, throwing, and working as a team: Timing and Placement.
The Placement is easy, as you've just got to put your hand there. And the timing is irrelevant because the dog can (and often does) wait for something to trigger the Bite. But to move on to a more mature skill the Trigger and the Target have to be properly related in time or we've got timing problems in the future.
The Take is used as a tool is to eliminate key difficult, yet important aspects of the skill while you learn how to do it. It makes the complex skills of placing a disc in space and time and the timing coordinated team movement simple, algorithmic exercises and does what all algrorithms are born to do: to hide the complexity of the reality and replace it with something that is more useful in this application.
Most all we do, I think, can be considered an algorithm. But the point is that an algorithm hides the details, sorts and categorizes, then highlights results. It's the hiding of the details and the sorting and categorization that are important here as they are, all at once, product, producer, and proof of the highlighted results. If the highlighted results are pointed and useful for predicting the future, then that is a successful algorithm. I think that's about it, right?
I'm not really having it out against algorithms, but they are limited and limiting, by definition as they are designed to get the truth without regard to experience or with limited data - good ones yield useful representations of reality.
The problem I see with algorithms comes along when vital data or a key variable is omitted from the algorithm's purview. If an algorithm doesn't factor a key element and that algorithm is relied upon to deliver a sense of reality, that key element can cease to exist in this reality. This can quickly turn into a wicked problem with a long tail, and it has in my little DiscDog World.
The Algorithm of Take, once it plays out, affects nearly all aspects of DiscDog freestyle. The ability of teams to perform, learn, and modify tricks is impacted. Judging is impacted. The very understanding of the Game is altered due to the pernicious omission of Time, Target, and Trigger and a
Using a Take makes a vault (dog leaps off handler's body for a disc) happen right now. I mean, that shit is easy. Not having to deal with timing the Trigger and the Target certainly does simplify things. But this success fools us - getting the answer we want is not the same as getting the answer we need. The answer we want, more often than not is to "Do the Vault". The answers we need are "Install a Trigger", "Get Target Lock", "Note the space and time of catch". All of those answers that we NEED, answers that will enable the team to Vault well, develop their skills, perform creative vaults and to do so in a mechanically safe and effective manner. All of these answers aren't even on the Radar with the Take. In fact they're not only hidden but they become completely irrelevant, or even worse, assumed to be completely understood.
This claim of understanding is not hubris, it's the practical result of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. If you are competent in doing the skill, you must know how to do it, right? I mean, I do it fine. I'm doing it... I'm doing it just like everybody else is doing it.
The easy success of the Algorithm of the Take for a vault tricks us into believing that we understand the vaulting process because we are "doing it right" - because we got The Answer™ - you know, the one that looks like my performance and understanding of the Vault. All this talk about separation, triggers, and targets is academic - what does it matter that my throw is 12 inches and the super bad ass player's throw is 48"? We're both doing the same thing, the dog is vaulting, right? Actually no, that's not right.
A vault has the dog leaping from the handler to get the disc. A properly triggered vault has the dog leaving the ground for a target. This is key for safe and successful vaulting because it means the dog makes 1 decision, and any weirdness in the throw is compensated for from the ground. So you give the trigger (usually presentation of the vaulting obstacle - leg, back, chest, etc), the dog responds. The handler throws the disc while the dog is responding allowing the target to be visible so as to allow collection from the ground for the target.
Teams laboring under the Algorithm of the Take can't make the throw until the dog has committed. So the dog is leaving the ground for nothing on the live vault, or is leaving the ground for some spot out there. The handler is then on the hook for delivering the target to the dog's mouth. If the handler makes any more than a 4-6 inch mistake on the throw, the dog is in trouble and has to pull a Plan B maneuver. That plan B maneuver will result in the tearing of your flesh and pits your dog's sense of self preservation against their drive to get the disc.
If the throw goes wrong on a vault that is properly triggered, the dog takes the mistake in stride, making even a 1-3 FOOT mistake in placement a fairly easy and safe recovery making the catch without rending flesh off the human or flailing around like they've been thrown out of a moving vehicle.
The two vault techniques are not at all the same, at root. And the Team - Dog and/or Handler - who suffers the negative effects the Algorithm of the Take likely doesn't even know these things exist or completely knows that they exist and are obviously doing them "Because I'm vaulting... just like Betty BadAss & Champ do."
This is the 21st Century. We've got the answers at the tip of our fingers at any time. If we don't know a piece of trivia and can't consult the google, we're uncomfortable. We are only comfortable when we know the answer, which means when we can do the skill. To not be able to do the skill is one thing, you just can't do it - yet... To not know what you're doing in a skill is a completely different situation.
A failure to understand is FAR worse than not being able to do it. To not be able to do it is to not be able to do it. To not know what a skill is, however or to not know what you're doing while you are doing said skill is to be something close to an idiot. I mean, what kind of fool can do a skill and doesn't know how it works? Most all of us, actually. I know very little about what is actually happening in DiscDog skills on a moment by moment basis. I'm learning dozens of new things per month and have been for the last 25 years.
The only people who really care about not knowing how a vault works is someone who has been tricked by the Algorithm of the Take into believing that they already know. Being exposed like that is to deliver the wrong answer in public, or even worse it could be like answering a math problem with "Potato". To quote the preface to my book:
There are so many questions; important questions. These questions rarely get asked because people walk around with full cups of limited experience. Filling our cup from the internet has become so easy that we are only comfortable if our cup is full and it loads fast. It’s OK to not know or to not understand something.
Seeking an answer to something you didn’t know is how you learned every thing you know. If your cup is full there is nothing to learn and this book will have nothing to teach.
Ron Watson, Tao of DiscDog
The problem with this is that nobody can stand having their cup empty - the moment we don't know something we hit up google and fill that cup up with The Answer™. The Algorithm of the Take fills up cups rapidly but vapidly.
If we're tricked by the algorithm then we just take all the new info and new answers and cram them into the same old pigeon hole.
Escaping the algorithm is both easy and simple which means It is a challenge to understand and requires some kind of experience or epiphany to pop the bubble of safety and surety that the Algorithm of the Take provides.
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