Strange Beta: Chaotic Variations for Indoor Rock Climbing Route Setting

In this paper we apply chaotic systems to the task of sequence variation for the purpose of aiding humans in setting indoor rock climbing routes. This work expands on prior work where similar variations were used to assist in dance choreography and music composition. We present a formalization for transcription of rock climbing problems and a variation generator which is tuned for our domain and addresses some confounding problems, including a new approach to automatic selection of variation initial conditions. We analyze our system with a pilot study in a small university rock climbing gym as well as a large blinded study in a commercial climbing gym in cooperation with experienced climbers and expert route setters. Our results show that our system is capable of assisting a human setter in producing routes which are at least as good as, and in some cases better than, those produced traditionally.