The Harvard Network Accessible Dartboard

These guys hacked a dartboard to serve scores over a wireless network. There is an OpenGL client that grabs the scores, runs the games, stores the results in a database, and suggests moves based on player's past performance. On top of all this, the client looks exactly like the dartboard, so it can be projected over the real thing.

Comments

Two things we can notice here:

[ksp]

1)
"Pedro V. Sander" desperately needs to get a life according to the stats!

2)
You can be no good at darts as long as you play alone, it is easy to cheat since the PC never notices when you miss the board altogether.

BTW: Pedro, I am not suggesting that there is a link between 1) and 2).

Also some game theory on the matter...

[mcarbone]

We also applied some game theory to the game 301 and to a game we invented called 30-Block, which you can read about here. We can solve 301 fairly easily, but 30-Block turns out to be quite intractable.

The more interesting part of this paper discusses probability models we use to predict where players will hit based on where they aim. It's interesting: if you are a perfect player, you have the highest expected value when aiming for Triple-20 (obviously), but the worse you get, the best place to aim in the boards spirals inward until it gets to double bulls-eye (which minimizes how often you miss the board).