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Most sports would profit from a deeper understanding and application of statistical inference. Or even of descriptive statistics. The fun lays in the operation

Most sports would profit from a deeper understanding and application of statistical inference. Or even of descriptive statistics. The fun lays in the operationalization, a step most applications of AI will likely omit, since AI will work out the dimensions of the data by itself. Boxing for example could calculate the amount of kinetic energy brought to the table and how much of it landed or was sidestepped. How much was absorbed? Not easy to do, but also not impossible.

lazide 2y ago
Frankly, boxing fans seem the least likely to care?
- shadowerm 2y ago
  No, this is a stupid idea for people who don't know anything about boxing. Effective aggression and ring generalship are subjective human judgements. Boxing results are varied because in a championship fight, many times rounds will be completely subjective. If you made boxing judged by AI, the rules would quickly be gamed. I suspect it would turn into a contest of jab/output and completely ruin boxing. What ultimately makes boxing great is a fight today doesn't look that much different than a fight 100 years ago. That is the whole fun of it. It is a really a symptom of a culture obsessed with scientism. As if adding a bullshit layer of scientism makes things somehow better and "smarter".
  - jstummbillig 2y ago
    I don't understand. Why would an AI judge inherently be more perceptible to being gamed than a human judge?
    - sbelskie 2y ago
      I believe the argument would be that humans are inconsistent, fallible, and gameable in idiosyncratic and individual ways not that they are less susceptible than AI.
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Computer systems fail systematically, humans fail more randomly (for most classes of failure)
      - meiraleal 2y ago
        > humans fail more randomly And often intentionally
        notahacker 2y ago
        Yep. The in-a-nutshell argument for AI is that there's an unusual amount of bias and corruption in boxing judges, who usually determine the victor. The in-a-nutshell argument against is that less subjective scoring systems like punch counting have already been tried as an alternative in Olympic boxing, but fans didn't like the adaptations in style that resulted. (Of course, dropping the punch counting for the 2016 Olympics immediately resulted in subjective judgements that were interesting at best...)
        llamaimperative 2y ago
        Sure but then you at least have basis to complain instead of “that’s just how the game is now.”
        jstummbillig 2y ago
        I don't see why we would need to say that, when we can debug and fix the system.
      - NeutralCrane 2y ago
        Not sure this holds, especially given the context of boxing, which is notorious for corruption.
    - harimau777 2y ago
      A computer can only judge based on things that can be measured. Martial arts (and really sports in general) rely heavily on things that can't be measured such as aggression, spirit, toughness, etc.
      - lazide 2y ago
        They get measured when it matters - in who gets beaten down at the end, yes?
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    I count myself as a pretty decent fan of boxing. To argue that the rules are not already being gamed is pretty shallow. Winning by points is pretty much standard. Providing one additional judge that auto-tallies wouldn't kill the sport. And I do believe the sport would benefit from, say, 3d reprojection to see a different view, or a heat map of hit vs throw locations, or a reproduction of movement throughout the ring. Other sports have had these deep stats for a long time, and boxing has what, jab counts, points, and knockdowns? Come on. I love the sport and I love data.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    A toubling aspect of the "bullshit scientism" is that confidence/belief in "AI" seems proportional to human mistrust of other humans. Therefore it's success rests on fomenting division and mistrust amongst people and iconoclasm of traditional skills/knowledge. Artificial ("intelligence") is, in it's very definition, deceptive.
    - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
      Which is ironic because trusting AI is fundamentally trusting the humans that made the AI over those that the AI replaces...
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    > …completely subjective. That may be. But all the gamblers demand objectivity. Whether or not this technology provides objectivity is not knowable now, but it has the empathetic storytelling that it does, which is all that matters for the marginal gambler.
  - dogman144 2y ago
    Good comment. When we parse, data science, and algo a barely structured brawl, sports are donezo and we get too far away finally from being human.
  - bsder 2y ago
    > If you made boxing judged by AI, the rules would quickly be gamed. I though boxers were already gaming rules and this is effectively what gave rise to stuff like MMA. Fans got tired of seeing a victor based upon technicality and skill and rules. Fans wanted a victor based upon being beaten down. It's kind of interesting in that I'm not that interested in this for boxing but would rather see these kinds of systems in stuff like gymnastics or ice skating. Gymnastics and ice skating get absolutely skewered for the fact that you have to be "politically connected" in order to score well over time. I suspect that having an AI scoring system that winds up scoring performances correctly regardless of political connection would be godsend to those kinds of sports.
hash872 2y ago
>Boxing for example could calculate the amount of kinetic energy brought to the table and how much of it landed or was sidestepped. How much was absorbed? Not easy to do, but also not impossible It would be pretty difficult to do in a combat sport without sensors. As I understand it fencing has participants' blades wired up for this exact reason. How would you measure how hard a punch landed from a distance? You could put sensors in the gloves, but some of the time the punches bounce off the opponent's forearms, so you could get a false 'powerful' rating from a blocked punch. Worse, some of the best punches aren't the most powerful in a kinetic sense, but just happen to very accurately land in the right spot on an opponent's chin. Or they're well timed and the opponent doesn't see it coming, so their surprise makes the strike more damaging. Even if you could precisely measure punch impact to the head from a distance, you'd be missing out on some excellent punches that are less powerful but set up by accuracy & timing. So yes it's basically impossible to measure in any way but subjectively
- Retric 2y ago
  F=MA Several very high speed and high resolution video cameras could collect all this information based on how glove, forearm, head, etc accelerate/rotate in real time. You don’t need to process it all in real time. A blow by blow after round highlights real based on the most damaging blows could grow the sport by making it more interesting to watch lesser matches.
  - hash872 2y ago
    The discussion was about scoring. In order to score the fight, you do need to process it in somewhat real time. I don't think waiting a few days to find out who won is going to be acceptable to fans
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 2y ago
      Sure, which is why AI scoring is a more difficult problem than creating an automatic instant replay with approximate forces. I’m still thinking minutes here which kind of blurs the long with real time scoring.
soared 2y ago
Some sports ready have - baseball and golf famously record effectively every action any player does. American Football makes a lot of claims/hype but we don’t get access to data like in baseball/golf.
mistermann 2y ago
Geopolitics and many other extremely important domains would too. I think it is going to become increasingly difficult to keep the various manufactured illusions our culture is composed of together. Hopefully the transition isn't too tumultuous.
goatlover 2y ago
Analytics has arguably made basketball worse, where everyone stands around the 3 point line, and the offense is mostly trying to shoot a 3 or go to the rim. Game used to be more diverse.
- Kon-Peki 2y ago
  Analytics changed a lot of things in baseball too. For example, analytics showed that stealing bases was a waste, and we saw a 6+ year window where hardly anybody tried to steal bases. But then, in 2023 steals were back in fashion. Why was that? More advanced analytics showing that the original analysis was wrong? Teams realizing that after years of not being forced to defend against the steal makes them more likely to be successful? Basketball will adjust. If nobody has to defend against a midrange jumper then eventually nobody will be in the position to defend against a midrange jumper and it becomes an easier shot to take. I’ve seen the complaints: the Bulls and Celtics are ruining basketball by shooting 50+ 3’s a game. But if that ruins basketball then basketball was weak to begin with. I mean seriously, neither the Bulls nor Celtics are getting anywhere close to the championship. Let them shoot 100 3’s a game if they want. Who cares?
  - baumy 2y ago
    I don't entirely disagree, but your point is undermined somewhat by the fact that the Celtics won the championship literally last year, and are currently favorites to win again this year.
    - Kon-Peki 2y ago
      That's a good point, and a serious brainfart on my part :)
harimau777 2y ago
I'm not sure that's realistically possible. The effect of a punch is going to depend on where exactly it landed, the angle of the punch, whether it landed solidly or glanced off, whether the person receiving the punch rolled with it, the physiology of the person receiving the punch, what punches the person has already received, how the person receiving the punch breaths, etc. Debatably there's other factors that should also factor into a judge's decision such as how aggressive a fighter is.
1659447091 2y ago
Baseball already does this for things like sprint speed, bat speed, contact point, attack angle, exit velocity, and launch angle with Weather Applied Metrics added to show how the wind robbed your team of a home run. For pitches there is trajectory, release point, spin axis, seam orientation. Then on defense, a players starting location and their path distance speed to the ball, catch probability and arm strength. That's not even all of it. MLB parks have many multiple high frame rate cameras installed along with their own datacenters. They are also working on replacing the umpire & strike zone with an Automated Ball/Strike System (ABS); which I am personally not to happy about--that would be like taking those awkward fist-fights out of hockey. https://technology.mlblogs.com https://technology.mlblogs.com
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  All that, while very cool technology, is going to be much simpler than judging how hard a punch hit. You could gauge how fast a punch was with the same sort of tech as that, but how well it connected, and how much force was applied, are much more difficult.

lazide 2y ago

Frankly, boxing fans seem the least likely to care?

shadowerm 2y ago
No, this is a stupid idea for people who don't know anything about boxing. Effective aggression and ring generalship are subjective human judgements. Boxing results are varied because in a championship fight, many times rounds will be completely subjective. If you made boxing judged by AI, the rules would quickly be gamed. I suspect it would turn into a contest of jab/output and completely ruin boxing. What ultimately makes boxing great is a fight today doesn't look that much different than a fight 100 years ago. That is the whole fun of it. It is a really a symptom of a culture obsessed with scientism. As if adding a bullshit layer of scientism makes things somehow better and "smarter".
- jstummbillig 2y ago
  I don't understand. Why would an AI judge inherently be more perceptible to being gamed than a human judge?
  - sbelskie 2y ago
    I believe the argument would be that humans are inconsistent, fallible, and gameable in idiosyncratic and individual ways not that they are less susceptible than AI.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Computer systems fail systematically, humans fail more randomly (for most classes of failure)
    - meiraleal 2y ago
      > humans fail more randomly And often intentionally
      - notahacker 2y ago
        Yep. The in-a-nutshell argument for AI is that there's an unusual amount of bias and corruption in boxing judges, who usually determine the victor. The in-a-nutshell argument against is that less subjective scoring systems like punch counting have already been tried as an alternative in Olympic boxing, but fans didn't like the adaptations in style that resulted. (Of course, dropping the punch counting for the 2016 Olympics immediately resulted in subjective judgements that were interesting at best...)
      - llamaimperative 2y ago
        Sure but then you at least have basis to complain instead of “that’s just how the game is now.”
        jstummbillig 2y ago
        I don't see why we would need to say that, when we can debug and fix the system.
    - NeutralCrane 2y ago
      Not sure this holds, especially given the context of boxing, which is notorious for corruption.
  - harimau777 2y ago
    A computer can only judge based on things that can be measured. Martial arts (and really sports in general) rely heavily on things that can't be measured such as aggression, spirit, toughness, etc.
    - lazide 2y ago
      They get measured when it matters - in who gets beaten down at the end, yes?
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  I count myself as a pretty decent fan of boxing. To argue that the rules are not already being gamed is pretty shallow. Winning by points is pretty much standard. Providing one additional judge that auto-tallies wouldn't kill the sport. And I do believe the sport would benefit from, say, 3d reprojection to see a different view, or a heat map of hit vs throw locations, or a reproduction of movement throughout the ring. Other sports have had these deep stats for a long time, and boxing has what, jab counts, points, and knockdowns? Come on. I love the sport and I love data.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  A toubling aspect of the "bullshit scientism" is that confidence/belief in "AI" seems proportional to human mistrust of other humans. Therefore it's success rests on fomenting division and mistrust amongst people and iconoclasm of traditional skills/knowledge. Artificial ("intelligence") is, in it's very definition, deceptive.
  - BehindBlueEyes 2y ago
    Which is ironic because trusting AI is fundamentally trusting the humans that made the AI over those that the AI replaces...
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  > …completely subjective. That may be. But all the gamblers demand objectivity. Whether or not this technology provides objectivity is not knowable now, but it has the empathetic storytelling that it does, which is all that matters for the marginal gambler.
- dogman144 2y ago
  Good comment. When we parse, data science, and algo a barely structured brawl, sports are donezo and we get too far away finally from being human.
- bsder 2y ago
  > If you made boxing judged by AI, the rules would quickly be gamed. I though boxers were already gaming rules and this is effectively what gave rise to stuff like MMA. Fans got tired of seeing a victor based upon technicality and skill and rules. Fans wanted a victor based upon being beaten down. It's kind of interesting in that I'm not that interested in this for boxing but would rather see these kinds of systems in stuff like gymnastics or ice skating. Gymnastics and ice skating get absolutely skewered for the fact that you have to be "politically connected" in order to score well over time. I suspect that having an AI scoring system that winds up scoring performances correctly regardless of political connection would be godsend to those kinds of sports.

hash872 2y ago

>Boxing for example could calculate the amount of kinetic energy brought to the table and how much of it landed or was sidestepped. How much was absorbed? Not easy to do, but also not impossible It would be pretty difficult to do in a combat sport without sensors. As I understand it fencing has participants' blades wired up for this exact reason. How would you measure how hard a punch landed from a distance? You could put sensors in the gloves, but some of the time the punches bounce off the opponent's forearms, so you could get a false 'powerful' rating from a blocked punch. Worse, some of the best punches aren't the most powerful in a kinetic sense, but just happen to very accurately land in the right spot on an opponent's chin. Or they're well timed and the opponent doesn't see it coming, so their surprise makes the strike more damaging. Even if you could precisely measure punch impact to the head from a distance, you'd be missing out on some excellent punches that are less powerful but set up by accuracy & timing. So yes it's basically impossible to measure in any way but subjectively

Retric 2y ago
F=MA Several very high speed and high resolution video cameras could collect all this information based on how glove, forearm, head, etc accelerate/rotate in real time. You don’t need to process it all in real time. A blow by blow after round highlights real based on the most damaging blows could grow the sport by making it more interesting to watch lesser matches.
- hash872 2y ago
  The discussion was about scoring. In order to score the fight, you do need to process it in somewhat real time. I don't think waiting a few days to find out who won is going to be acceptable to fans
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 2y ago
    Sure, which is why AI scoring is a more difficult problem than creating an automatic instant replay with approximate forces. I’m still thinking minutes here which kind of blurs the long with real time scoring.

soared 2y ago

Some sports ready have - baseball and golf famously record effectively every action any player does. American Football makes a lot of claims/hype but we don’t get access to data like in baseball/golf.

mistermann 2y ago

Geopolitics and many other extremely important domains would too. I think it is going to become increasingly difficult to keep the various manufactured illusions our culture is composed of together. Hopefully the transition isn't too tumultuous.

goatlover 2y ago

Analytics has arguably made basketball worse, where everyone stands around the 3 point line, and the offense is mostly trying to shoot a 3 or go to the rim. Game used to be more diverse.

Kon-Peki 2y ago
Analytics changed a lot of things in baseball too. For example, analytics showed that stealing bases was a waste, and we saw a 6+ year window where hardly anybody tried to steal bases. But then, in 2023 steals were back in fashion. Why was that? More advanced analytics showing that the original analysis was wrong? Teams realizing that after years of not being forced to defend against the steal makes them more likely to be successful? Basketball will adjust. If nobody has to defend against a midrange jumper then eventually nobody will be in the position to defend against a midrange jumper and it becomes an easier shot to take. I’ve seen the complaints: the Bulls and Celtics are ruining basketball by shooting 50+ 3’s a game. But if that ruins basketball then basketball was weak to begin with. I mean seriously, neither the Bulls nor Celtics are getting anywhere close to the championship. Let them shoot 100 3’s a game if they want. Who cares?
- baumy 2y ago
  I don't entirely disagree, but your point is undermined somewhat by the fact that the Celtics won the championship literally last year, and are currently favorites to win again this year.
  - Kon-Peki 2y ago
    That's a good point, and a serious brainfart on my part :)

harimau777 2y ago

I'm not sure that's realistically possible. The effect of a punch is going to depend on where exactly it landed, the angle of the punch, whether it landed solidly or glanced off, whether the person receiving the punch rolled with it, the physiology of the person receiving the punch, what punches the person has already received, how the person receiving the punch breaths, etc. Debatably there's other factors that should also factor into a judge's decision such as how aggressive a fighter is.

1659447091 2y ago

Baseball already does this for things like sprint speed, bat speed, contact point, attack angle, exit velocity, and launch angle with Weather Applied Metrics added to show how the wind robbed your team of a home run. For pitches there is trajectory, release point, spin axis, seam orientation. Then on defense, a players starting location and their path distance speed to the ball, catch probability and arm strength. That's not even all of it. MLB parks have many multiple high frame rate cameras installed along with their own datacenters. They are also working on replacing the umpire & strike zone with an Automated Ball/Strike System (ABS); which I am personally not to happy about--that would be like taking those awkward fist-fights out of hockey. https://technology.mlblogs.com https://technology.mlblogs.com

robertlagrant 2y ago
All that, while very cool technology, is going to be much simpler than judging how hard a punch hit. You could gauge how fast a punch was with the same sort of tech as that, but how well it connected, and how much force was applied, are much more difficult.