Roy, I think it is pretty well understood that ADDs measure how many distinct elements make-up a given trick. If I'm not badly mistaken, I'm pretty sure the ADD system was originally meant to measure difficulty, and the assumption/compromise at that time was, and the biggest flaw in the ADD system now, is that each move element is assumed to be more-or-less equal in difficulty to every othe move element, where-as now we have seen ample examples of how each move element is not necessarily equal in difficulty to every other element, and more-so there are some combinations of move elements that are much harder than other combinations of elements.PoisonTaffy wrote:I hope I'm not making an idiot out of myself,
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Wouldn't you say that the ADD system does a much better job at measuring trick complexity rather than difficulty?
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For example, a 2 add trick may involve one super hard movement, and a 5 add trick may involve 2-3 very easy movements. In this case, the 2 add is more difficult, but less complex.
X-Dex and Paradox are both recognitions of this problem. Paradox essentially says "one dex can be harder than another because you've got to move more to do the dex." By convention, the extra movement you must, in theory, perform in order to do the dexterity element, is called an additional Body ADD... doing the dex from the "wrong side" means that you also have to do an extra body movement that is worth an extra ADD.
X-Dex, on the other hand, says that some combinations of two or more Dexterity moves are harder than other combinations of two or more dexterity moves. I'm not even going to attempt to simplify which combinations of dexes are considered harder and why they're harder...
As far as measuring complexity, yes, you can put it that way. Another way of putting it is that the ADD system measure the VARIETY of elements that make-up a move. ADDs, in fact, have been used to measury VARIETY in competition as well as DIFFICULTY, at the same time. Personally, I recommend all freestylers should familiarize themselves with what is usually refered to as the "Formula-Based Judging System"
http://www.footbag.org/rules/chapter/500
505.02 - Formula-Based Judging System
Personally, I think its a pretty cool collection of calculations to score a 2-minute freestyle performance. You can see how ADDs were used to measure difficulty and "Composition" - the variety of move elements used by the competitor.
(the Formula Judging hasn't been used in about ten years -- it fell out of favor because it took many extra sub-judges, and took lots of extra time to count-up all the different individual things that all those sub-judges were tracking -- Finals would finish, and we wouldn't have a result for twenty or thirty minutes... some felt like footbag would be much improved without this kind of waiting-for-the-results delay).
ADDs, I've heard from the actual creators of the system, also had an unintended benefit of helping to create more new freestyle moves by giving players a new way of thinking about moves. As a way to deconstruct a move into its component move-elements, it also allowed freestylers to think of new ways to re-arrange already familiar move elements into new combinations. Thus ADDs, some say, helped to further the developement of freestyle.
Personally, I'm fairly impressed at how much milage we've gotten out of the ADD system. Which is not to say that we can't also hope for a better measure of difficulty. Perhaps we've already gotten as much out of the ADD system as we're ever going to get, and its time (past time) to move beyond it. However, thats not an easy nut to crack, people have been at it for year without any major break-throughs yet.
It's like you pointed out, Roy -- not all move elements add the same amount of difficulty to a trick. There are easier elements and combinations of elements, and there are harder elements or combinations there-of. What has been annoying me for the past few days (again) is that there are move-elements that actually make a move EASIER with the presense of those elements than without... for example (and I'm NOT speaking from my own experience, I'm relying on some other freestylers I've known...) Voodoo... thats paradox miraging symposium mirage, I think (clip > same in-dex [paradox] > op no-plant in-dex [symposium] > op toe stall). Better freestylers than I have said this move, with its second dex being symposium, is actually easier than if you try to do the move with the second dex NOT symposium... I wouldn't really know, but I'll take their word on it.
For my own example, one I think I'm pretty well qualified to comment on, I'd point out another little paradox (a litteral paradox, not a double-hip-pivot
) in scoring the difficulty of footbag tricks --- Stalls (delays). Most advanced players will feel that toe stalls and clipper stalls, are, eventually so easy that it seems a little pointless to award them with "points" for their difficulty. This has been the subject of some debate for a long time in one form or another. For instance, many moves ending in clipper could be said to have an unfair advantage over moves ending on toes. How could Atom Smasher and Butterfly have the same difficulty? Similarly, SOME moves ending on toe but starting on clipper also share a similar "unfair advantage" over moves that START AND END on toes. Again, how could Atom Smasher be the same difficulty level as Paradox Mirage? Butterfly is incorrectly scored equal in difficulty to Atom Smasher just because it "gets an extra point for cross-body" even though that clipper-stall-ending isn't really any more difficult than a toe-stall-ending for an advanced player. and Paradox Mirage incorrectly has the same difficulty score as Atom Smasher just because Paradox Mirage starts on clipper but Atom Smasher doesn't, although that clipper-set and "extra-pivot" doesn't really increase the difficulty much for an advanced player. X-Dex was the "solution" to this question. Basically, some toe-to-toe moves were under-valued in the ADD scoring system because they couldn't benefit from cross-body or paradox ADDs, so X-Dex was invented to compensate. Of course, this was only a partial solution because it still left plenty of stuff out... and also left some confusing questions...Back to my own example of this problem -- Stalls (delays) themselves. Clearly, for a beginner player, stalls are much harder to perform than kicks. Developing that reflex to catch the bag with your foot rather than just kick it takes a considerable investment of time and effort (well, for many of us, maybe not everybody). Similarly, although most advanced players probably feel that clipper stalls are no real challenge, and, perhaps even easier than inside stalls, many will at least agree that they were somewhat awkward at first. I know I thought that clippers were much harder than inside stalls initially, so it made perfect sense for a long time that if "inside stall" was a certain level of difficulty, "cross-body inside stall" was the next level up in difficulty.
So, stalls (and your most basic cross-body stall) should qualify for some extra "points" for their difficulty. BUT, it's been bothering me for some time that, although we award ourselves extra points for the delays, points as though what we're doing is more difficult with the stalls than without... most of what semi-advanced freestylers do would actually be MUCH harder if done with just kicks than with stalls. Consider a simple string of 10 tricks in a row, tricks like butterfly, ducking clipper, spinning clipper, paradox mirage, and double-leg-over -- the stalls actually make it easy for us to do this -- to do something similar WITHOUT the benefit of catching the bag on our feet would be really challenging.
So, the paradox here is that while basic stalls are harder than basic kicks ON THEIR OWN, basic stalls give us much more control over the bag than basic kicks (consider - you have much more control of something when you catch it in your hand than when you just bounce it up off your palm...), that extra control makes the things we do inbetween contacts (the dexes, spins, ducks, etc.) much easier. What adds difficulty in one circumstance removes difficulty in another. Like Voodoo, but in a much broader way. So, one of many little challenges to inventing a system that accurately scores the difficulty of tricks is to account for how, in some instances, a familiar move-element adds difficulty to the trick, but in other instances, that SAME kind of move element makes another combination of elements less difficult. Man, scoring difficulty in freestyle footbag is going to be more challenging than actually playing freestyle footbag...
