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A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

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Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#11

Post by lostemptations5 »

I don't know. This is ok if it's helpful, but reminds me of why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost.

As I got more into chess and with the advancement of chess computers and championships, I felt there was little creativity left to have fun with the game.

So for dancing, it's literally meant to be "danced".

Of course you can figure out all the combinations and so on, but being overly analytical about it removes -- for me -- the entire reason to do it : to escape the intellectual world and do something kinesthetic.

I understand I am probably an outlier here on HN. :)

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#12

Post by abernard1 »

I enjoy the attempt to analyze the dancing (really choreography). But I'm surprised that in this new world of LLM hype not one word in there was dedicated to what dance really is: a language.

Dance is a physical, kinesthetic language.

And to riff on some of the posters, it's this expression and communication between the dancers that makes dancing worth dancing. There's also the social communication between the group, cultural "dialects" and "accents" (on1 vs on2, stylings, etc.)

I began dancing when I realized there was an entire spectrum of the senses closed off to me from overthinking. Besides the specifics of "body language," good dancers can convey intense amounts of emotion. I met someone who could "talk" to me for hours and she never needed to say a word. While the poster attempts to represent dancing in terms of a symbolic language, I'd recommend anyone interested in dance to also try the opposite: realize the physicality is the language and medium of expression. It's more fun, and I promise you your style of thinking will enlarge and grow.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#14

Post by [deleted] »

lostemptations5 wrote: post #11

I don't know. This is ok if it's helpful, but reminds me of why I quit playing chess: the mystery was lost. As I got more into chess and with the advancement of chess computers and championships, I felt there was little creativity left to have fun with the game. So for dancing, it's literally meant to be "danced". Of course you can figure out all the combinations and so on, but being overly analytical about it remove…

[deleted]

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#15

Post by chrisjj »

vlz wrote: post #8
chrisjj wrote: post #3

Just me, or is this ornithology for birds?

I see this as an almost scientific/scholarly exercise in modeling. While the author seems not to start with any intent to "do science" he or she tries to capture a concrete phenomenon abstractly in order to study it more closely, which is arguably at the heart of science or at least some of the sciences. The post is "almost" scholarly because it does not try to look into what others did before or currently, eg. prior…

Indeed. Where it goes wrong is the notion it will help people learn how to dance.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#16

Post by geewee »

Having danced for around a decade, I would say the hand positioning example is a bit reductive. The most obvious example is that there's only one variant of "both hands crossed over" - while it's true that the hands might only fit together one way, the things you can do with the hands depending on what arm is on top varies significantly.

Having said that I'm pretty excited about the topic and what the author can do with it.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#17

Post by geewee »

damhsa wrote: post #9

the supposed 15 hand holds is a little misleading as it doesn't account for holds where a hand is placed on the body, which is important to many dancing traditions, such as the mirror image polka hold, with the man's left arm stretched to his left holding his girl's right hand, and his right on her body, or the rotationally symmetric ceilidh hold, where both partners hold left hands, and pass their right hand over an…

Nor does it capture that you might be holding your hands in different ways, such as which side is rotated up.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#18

Post by geewee »

chrisjj wrote: post #15
vlz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this as an almost scientific/scholarly exercise in modeling. While the author seems not to start with any intent to "do science" he or she tries to capture a concrete phenomenon abstractly in order to study it more closely, which is arguably at the heart of science or at least some of the sciences. The post is "almost" scholarly because it does not try to look into what others did before or currently, eg. prior…

Indeed. Where it goes wrong is the notion it will help people learn how to dance.

I could see stuff like this helping advanced dancers come up with new stuff or perhaps help some instructors.

Re: A New Kind Of Dance Science (combinatorics of social dancing)

#19

Post by matheist »

abernard1 wrote: post #12

I enjoy the attempt to analyze the dancing (really choreography). But I'm surprised that in this new world of LLM hype not one word in there was dedicated to what dance really is: a language. Dance is a physical, kinesthetic language. And to riff on some of the posters, it's this expression and communication between the dancers that makes dancing worth dancing. There's also the social communication between the group,…

Agree. I think the approach in TFA is like trying to analyze, say, improv comedy via a context-free grammar for English. There might be something there, in the syntax, but it misses a huge amount of semantics and paralanguage.
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