Goliath beats David almost every time, unless David breaks the rules and defies convention.
David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
Lots of anecdotes at the link, including an AI angle!
(HT: RB.)
Rome Total War changed my understanding of the David v. Goliath story. Slings were a very common weapon back then. They didn't require much training. They were cheap to make. Ammo was free. And they were extremely effective against unarmored opponents, but nearly worthless against armored opponents.
Imagine that people are throwing fist-sized rocks at you. If you're unarmored, then you'll be incapacitated in a minute or two. If you're wearing armor, especially metal armor, then you'll hardly feel a thing---if the rocks hit the armor. But every so often a rock will hit one of the weak spots in your armor, especially the spaces in your helmet that allow you to see.
So the real David v. Goliath battle wasn't won on a brilliant tactical decision. Tactically it was suicide to take a sling against a fully armored opponent. The miracle was the one-in-a-million shot: The rock sailed through the opening in the helmet and knocked him out. So I read it as a story of divinely inspired super-accuracy.
That's a really good article, though.