Jeet Approved &Random Opinions ranjeet on 25 Jul 2010 01:31 pm
Settling Hypotheticals With “Science”
This post is about one of my favorite & ridiculous shows on television. Its premise is in many ways a perfect one : to predict the outcome of a battle that can never happen, ensuring that its results can never be proven true or false.
The show I am speaking of is The Deadliest Warrior, broadcast on Spike TV on Tuesdays. Each week, the show pits two warriors against each other in the court of television opinion. Some of the contestants are familiar heroes from history, such as a Spartan or a Samurai, and some are more contemporary, such as The Taliban or the KGB. How can they possibly compare warriors of such different abilities, time period, and weaponry? With Science, of course.
The three “judges” of the contest include a biomedical scientist, a doctor with ER trauma surgeon experience, and a computer programmer. The biomedical guy sets up experiments so that they can test the warriors methods and tactics and get quantitative data out of it. The doctor evaluates the simulated wounds that the weapons make, and judges whether an injury is superficial, debilitating, or just plain fatal. And the computer programmer takes all this data and inputs it into a model that runs 1000 simulated battles between the warriors, deciding who the winner is. The show then stages a choreographed battle between actors dressed as the warriors, with the winner of the computer simulation revealed as the winner of this heated battle.
There are many reasons I love this show. First of all, the “experts”. Since the warriors in question often do not exist any more, they get people to come in who are considered experts on the subject, two people per warrior. If the warrior is an Apache, for example, they can get actual Apache to come and talk about the culture and the weapons. However, when the subject is Celtic warriors, they have to just get people who are interested in medieval history and weaponry. All four people are present during all the tests and weapons demonstrations, and all four people must be contractually obligated to trash talk the other team and offer objections to any spectacular display of martial ability. They are always supremely confident that their warrior will reign supreme.
Secondly, the test subjects. Obviously, they cannot test the lethality of the weapons on real people. But they can use simulated people! One the one hand, they can use synthetic people, such as human dummies made of ballistic gel, which has a similar consistency to human flesh. They pour the ballistic gel into molds with simulated (or real??) bone, so that the dummies have skulls and ribs and everything. They also add in bags of fake blood, so that an inflicted wound will bleed messily. But sometimes, that’s just not good enough! They also use pig carcasses (also with strategically placed fake blood bags) to give that extra bit of realism, as pig carcasses (as you may know from episodes of Mythbusters) offer a very close simulation of human flesh.
Thirdly, the test equipment. The biomedicist adds pressure sensors to skulls and armor, and radar and laser detectors to measure weapon velocity. They film the demonstrations with high speed cameras to get great slow motion videos of maces crushing skulls. Did you know it takes about 80 psi of pressure to crush someone’s skull? I do, now.
Fourthly, the weapons. Each warrior gets four weapons to test in battle. Typically, there is one long range, one medium range, one short range, and one “wild card” weapon. It’s always cool to see each culture/disciplines armory. Samurai katana vs. Viking Longsword? Flamethrower vs RPG? Let’s see what they can do to some pigs!
The way the show is set up, it makes for some interesting and sometimes disturbing confrontations. For instance, the first season finale was a battle between the IRA and the Taliban. Experts were basically trashtalking each other about being the better terrorist. The first show that I caught this season was between the Nazi SS and the Viet Cong. It’s really hard to be a cheerleader for SS weaponry and abilities without seeming like a bit of a Nazi.
But finally, the one thing I love is how they always ignore the giant elephant in the room : the computer model. The experts will constantly argue about the efficacy of the weapons. One heavy weapon will demolish fake skulls, and the opposing experts will say something to the effect of “it’s one thing to attack a stationary dummy, but theres no way you would be able to strike a <insert opposing warrior here> with a weapon that slow”. But they will never say “that computer model way overvalues projectile speed over penetration depth.” This central fiction of the show is hilarious. The proprietary model is considered sacrosanct when in reality its the most important factor in all the rankings. No doubt, Slytherin Studios will never offer up the model Weightings for public perusal, but one day enough shows will pass that one could probably come up with the ultimate warrior by inferring the Weighting based on previous battles. At this point, I will invent a ancient warrior with a specialized backstory and with special weapons that will crush all others in their path. And then finally, I will get the official title of Deadliest Warrior.
The show is filled with so much testosterone that its impossible for any red-blooded male to resist (yeah, that’s right, if you don’t like this show you must not really be a man). After seeing that SS vs Vietcong battle, I went on wikipedia to find out the battles that I had missed. I was really intrigued to see that an Indian Rajput warrior battled a Roman Centurion earlier this year, and that the full episode was online. Hopefully this will stay online, but you can check it out here (no embed, unfortunately, and 40 minutes long). The weapons that are brought to the table in this one are incredible.