How the weeks fit together

The four acts, and why each week needs the one before it

Week 1 sets out what a strategist decides and what the rulebook fixes first. The eleven weeks after it fall into four acts, and each act adds one thing the act before it could not represent.

The time trial, weeks 2 to 4. One car, alone on track. A lap time is separated into the things driving it, a stop is priced against the regulations around it, and the race becomes a loop turning a strategy into a finishing time. No other car appears in it, which is what makes it a time trial.

It’s a contest, weeks 5 and 6. Classification is by position rather than by time, and a rival answers when you move. Week 5 is where the first act stops being enough: the stop lap that wins on time and the one that wins on position are not the same lap, so a week-4 model answered the wrong question confidently.

It’s uncertain, weeks 7 to 9. Interruption as a hazard rate rather than an event, an irreversible commitment made against a forecast, then a distribution over finishing positions instead of a number. Week 3 pays off here: a stop that has become cheap is worth nothing without a set of tyres left to fit.

It’s judgeable, weeks 10 to 12. Whose race it is, what the screen shows, and whether the probabilities on it occur at the rate they claim.

The dependencies that genuinely bind are in the last act. Week 10 cannot come earlier, because trading a safe fourth against a risky second is only expressible once a distribution over finishing positions exists. Week 11 cannot come before either: a display is a lossy compression of that distribution, ranked under the objective week 10 settled, so both have to exist before there is anything to compress. Calibration is last because the instrument is handed in at the end of the teaching weeks — the last thing taught is when not to believe what you are about to submit.

Assignment 1 falls in week 8 rather than at the midpoint by count. It rests on the first two acts, and the two-week teaching break falls between weeks 6 and 7: after the material it draws on, before the week it is due, and that break is its working time.

The week-by-week is on Lectures and Labs; each week’s page carries what that week does.