I never really understood this. Unless each clone practices a different technique, why would it help him? Each clone would make the same mistakes, so if anything it will hurt him as the mistakes will be engraved in his mind.

 

I suppose it could be said that you'd have the clones focusing on separate aspects of the technique.

Like, say, one focuses on hand-seal speed, another focuses on chakra output, a third focuses on finding it's range, etc etc.

Still a good point, though.

 

Obviously they don't make the same mistakes, how else would you explain some clones cutting the leaf earlier than others in cannon?? I think it just makes them compete with eachother so that they try harder or something. And also, you learn from your mistakes right? If Naruto IS an idiot he would need to make the same mistake a thousand times to learn from it. Makes sense right?

 

I thought about that, but it still doesn't make sense because the fastest way to learn is to combine them all. Maybe a clone practicing hand-seals will speed things up a bit, but months? Come on...

 

actually the logical argument is sound to some extent.
Take the tree exercise, no two trees are the same, the bark will have different texture, the angle will be different etc. All those small differences will mean that their experience is subtly different, meaning that he will learn something from combining it.

The cutting leaf exercise is a rather bad example on the other hand, unless he uses different kind of leafs, since the important parameters (thickness and texture) of the leafs would be close.

Another factor is that multiple clones mean multitasking. You can send two to practice X, two to practice Y etc. etc. etc. etc. which with the amount of clones he uses in Canon would mean that he can basically spend a week practicing a single skill, but at the same time his clones could practice twenty other skills during the same week.

So in closing, i don't think you can speed through years of training with shadow clones and i dislike fics where that happens, but what you CAN do is practice everything at the same time, so you can be a well rounded person instead of a one trick pony

 

The trick in the tree exercise is using the correct amount of chakra into the legs. The tree has little to do with it. Practicing this exercise with clones might help with walking on the tree with low(er) amount of chakra, but it won't give you, as I see it, any actual skills.

I'm pretty new to Naruto, but as far as I know, once you mastered a technique you don't need to practice it anymore. If that's the case, than the clones will help him in a signifact way only if he finds a lot of things to practice every week, which I doubt a small boy with no resources and outside help can do.

 

Multiple clones work because whenever you start out doing something, you have a probability although a small one to do it right the first time. When you try a second time your odds of getting it right slightly improves. Eventually, after an arbituary amount of attempts, you do it right and from then on odds of getting it right each successive try improves drastically as you repeat whatever actions involved in getting the desired result. As time goes on your chances of success near certainty, as you figure out everything you need to do in order to be successful at whatever you were doing.

Therefore, when Naruto has twenty clones working on a technique, he has twenty opportunities for success at every attempt. That speeds up the process a huge amount and he is able to do years amount of trial and error in a shorter amount of time.

 

You assume that somehow, each and every single one of Naruto's clones will do something in a completely identical way. That's an utterly absurd assumption, it's like telling someone to perform a task repeatedly, and believing that each repetition will be identical to all the previous ones.

There will always be subtle differences in the way that each clone performs a certain exercise. It could be due to the differences in a clone's position relative to the others, the air pressure being slightly off for some clones rather than others, and a million different other things. It's like one of those "a butterfly flutters its wings and a hurricane...." thingies. You cannot predict what and how certain factors will influence certain decisions.

People are not machines, they don't have enough precision to do things exactly the same over and over again. Especially not in this case, where there are so many external environmental differences to account for with regards to each single clone, that's not even considering how one clone may differ from the others. We've never really gotten any details on how the Shadow Clone really works, whether or not the clones may exhibit different personality traits of the creator.

 

Let's stick to physics for the first example:
you use X chakra to stick a surface at angle Y with a friction coefficient of Z to hold up your mass (which obviously stays the same).

The goal of the exercise is finding out how much of X you need and then to practice until you send that precise amount out each and every time.

So if you only practiced on a single tree at some point you'd be able to do that specific amount without even thinking of it.

On the other hand, if you spread your practice around 10 trees you will learn to deal with the different factors Y and Z but it will take you significantly longer. Meaning Naruto with his insane shadow skillz will improve his control faster because his clones each learn to use a different amount, therefor spreading his control over a larger area.


For the second point you raised i guess that is like any other skill. How long does it take someone to learn to make a single Golf Shot? Now compare his Golf shot to one done by Tiger Woods.
One is an amateur the other is a pro who has practiced that precise swing for hours and hours on end.
To put it into Naruto terms, he will learn to do the Seals faster, he will learn how the fireball flows, what he must do to send it faster or slower, how to aim etc. etc. etc. etc.

Sure he might be able to throw a fireball (or windblade or whatever) once he has learned it, but there is a rather large area of improvement between being able to do something and having fully mastered an ability.

 

nvm, I tired.

 

Why would a clone act differently than an other clone? I understand why they would attack differently -them being in different places and the need of teamwork will change their thought process- but why would they do the technique any differently than an other clone?

 

You just answered your own question. How do the clones know that they're in a different position? How do they know that teamwork is required and how do they each know their own places in the overall plan?

The answer is observation. The clones can think for themselves. All they have to do is look around them, watch what the others or the original is doing, and then it's up to them to decide how to do whatever it is a little differently. From that point on, the clone's ability to think for itself comes into play, and with the unique external stimuli each clone receives, its thought process also becomes unique, no matter how physically identical the clones may be. Which leads back to my original argument a few posts earlier.

Of course, for certain exercises, there's really no difference. Such as when Naruto was trying cut leaves with wind chakra. There's really only so many ways to channel wind and cut a leaf. The main purpose of the clones in that particular exercise was to gain experience, to give Naruto the memories and experience of channeling wind chakra thousands of times, not to show him how many different places a leaf could be cut.

 

I had this conversation on a different forum. I likened it to spending a hundred days doing the same thing over and over again without the memories of previous days to aid with natural improvement. There would be some variation, but without the memories of previous days you, on average, only progress as far as the previous day in your training. By the end of the hundred days, even if you gained all hundred days' worth of memories, you wouldn't have improved any more than that. Unfortunately, that is apparently wrong.

The basic consensus is that things like elemental chakra manipulation can only be improved upon via repeated trials, like a computer game's XP levelling up. Basically, Kishimoto is an idiot who didn't think things through. There's no point in really trying to argue for or against how the technique works because it shouldn't yet we are given canon evidence that it does.

 

I'll refer you to my earlier posts....
As i tried to make clear yes Kishimoto didn't think things through, but there ARE hundreds of ways to make use of extra time (that's basically what shadow clone training is) to improve your skills as a ninja. As soon as you change any single variable the experience of doing whatever he is practicing changes as well, meaning he will have gained at least some other knowledge.

And YES i agree that simply sending 500 clones to climb trees will not mean that you will have spent 500 days climbing trees, the experience will more likely mean something like 200 days total since inevitably SOME parts of their experience will be the exact same thing.

To get back to the earlier point have you ever tried to learn some kind of manual skill which is highly delicate? (e.g. Golf you'd be surprised how much difference a minute hook on the swing means for the way the fucking ball flies). If you did you'll notice that it will take you at LEAST 100 tries before you produce the first reasonable attempt. But once you have that first experience the improvements come notably faster, and you will find at many many many small things that together make a better whole (that finger a bit higher, left foot two degrees to the right, back straighter etc.etc.etc.). If you try to do this yourselve than it WILL take ages to become anywhere close to good, whereas if you had a hundred copies who could each practice and try, chances are they'd find at least 20 individual improvements compared to the single one you'd find yourselve.

(edit):
@Grubdudub

Try to do the exact same thing twenty times in a row. The more complicated it gets the harder it is do it. A very small outside influence (sudden noise from the guy sitting/standing next to you) will most likely mean you will find an entirely new way to screw up. So summa summarum no the 200 clones will not do the exact same thing, they will be influenced by many small things to make many many many different things, even while trying to do the same thing.

 

It's not about improving; it's about learning what not to do, so the next time you have more chance of doing the right thing.

 

They're influenced by almost identical sets of environments. I believe that even if the slight difference will make me move slightly more to the left, it won't matter in any significant way. I used to do judo and one of the exercises is to do the exact thing over and over hundreds. The thing is, for the exercise to be affective, you need to do it perfectly or you'll risk driving the mistake into your reflexes. If you're mistakes are not pointed out to you or are fairly obvious, you won't get anything out of it. To mindlessly do the same thing thousands of times is like 1000X0 - at best.

 

What happens here is that no reflexes are formed unless they're all doing it wrong in the same way. If anything, this sort of method is superior to doing it normally because it actually prevents you from forming reflexive actions until the point where you've got it down enough that there's very little variation in the exercise - in other words, the point that it's nearly perfect.

Actually, with how so many of the ninja abilities are supposed to work, I wonder if any ninja has reflexive actions of any sort. I sort of suspect that one of the ideas driving the Naruto-verse is that the better the ninja, the fewer reflexive actions he'll have, and the more of his actions will be carefully considered and deliberately executed.

In particular, since almost all ninja abilities are chakra-dependent, and chakra is half dependent on a mental component, I suspect that it might not even be possible to have a reflexive action that involves chakra, except perhaps to reject foreign chakra.

Just a (fairly spontaneous) thought.

Narion

 

i don't have extensive experience with martial arts (military basic is all i have in that area) but what you have said about reflexes is true obviously, but we are talking about two vastly different things here.
We are neither talking about muscle memory (obviously it won't help at all to have a clone do situps...) nor are we talking about actual fighting experience, both of which are areas where reflexes are important.
We are talking about practicing and learning specific skills which sometimes have something to do with your body (tajitsu, handseals etc.) but mostly which rely on a mental component (chakra and everything truly chakra based).
THOSE areas and anything knowledge related is where you can improve yourselve with Shadow clones.

Regarding the enviroment no, because as soon as one clone is influenced to make a gruesome mistake he will start a chain reaction of different amounts of influence.

anyway, enough about this discussion, if you don't agree with me (and the others) fine, let's agree to disagree because frankly it's a fictional universe and no amount of discussion can convey the rules of it to us.

Ps: Summed up in one sentence our difference is that i subscribe to the chaos theory and you don't

 

Before I'll shut up and wait for an update, I'll just say that the brain memory of an action can be equal or more important compared to muscle memory. A super-ninja with amnesia won't be half as good as he was before, despite what the movies say.

 

Where is that amazing one-shot about how Naruto remembers the clones actions including death?
That is the thing I hate about this stupid clone power. It is used as instant and cheap training.
Hell, everyone would be doing this if they could.