[ianbooker]

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.

[hash872]

>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

[noodlesUK]

You mentioned fencing: the electronic scoring system in fencing is pretty primitive, and has not at all replaced the need for a referee. It determines whether a hit has landed, and that’s about it. Unfortunately the sport still has a big problem with how subjective the refereeing is (particularly in sabre, which is my weapon), and that’s driving corruption at the highest levels [1].

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/world/europe/fencing-olym...

[jdietrich]

Accurately assessing the quantity and quality of punches landed is entirely tractable. If you can accurately track the movement of each fighter's joints (plausible with camera-based CV, almost trivial with LIDAR) then you're just solving a fairly straightforward dynamics problem. A well-timed hook or uppercut to the chin is more damaging for predictable biomechanical reasons - rotational trauma causes more damage than translational trauma because it results in greater shear forces within the brain, particularly the brain stem. It isn't a massively more difficult problem than the doppler radar systems used to track ball movement in sports like golf and baseball.

I think the harder problem is assessing the subjective factors mentioned by shadowerm, but that's also a hard problem for human judges.

[Retric]

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.

[1659447091]

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

[robertlagrant]

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.

[goatlover]

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]

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?

[soared]

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.

[harimau777]

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.

[mistermann]

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.

[lazide]

Frankly, boxing fans seem the least likely to care?

[shadowerm]

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".