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Australia's Technological World Cup Advantage
hotsauce writes "The BBC has a piece about how Australia is using software to gain an advantage in the World Cup. The Socceroos are running software that looks for patterns in attacks of the opposing team. It also shows the effectiveness of different response strategies by recording where attacks fail when countered. This is the first time Australia has reached the World Cup in 30 years, but a real test of the technology will come today when Australia must take on five-time and current world champions Brasil. The Socceroos talk about specific strategies for that game, also."
lol...beat me to it...
The gates in my computer are AND, OR and NOT; they are not Bill.
Yes, real football doesn't involve kicking a ball with your feet!
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
My biggest problem with soccer (futbal?) is that it seems too random. It takes almost shear coincidence to get the ball into the goal. Low scores don't have enough occurences to factor out coincidence. It is hard to see strategy and skill turn directly into scores (or lack of scores in the case of defense). It is almost like large-scale pin-ball where the paddles barely affect the direction of the ball. I would suggest widening the gaol box.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, you're doing a pretty good job of sounding like a Nike ad. Sure, a culture conducive to doing something will help people who grow up within that culture do that thing. Just another unfair advantage which the scrappy Teutonic and American underdogs will eventually have to overcome. I can't wait for bright lines to be abolished in all sports, allowing all top-level competitors to do anything they want to do to enhance themselves for peak in-game performance. I don't care about the safety of the athletes; if they're going to be paid such vast sums, I want to see some reality bending performance, and their health and safety be damned. Joga Bonita, Cyborgs!
They make winning a matter of science in all sports. They run full hydrodynamic analysis on their swimmer performance using an approach not dissimilar to the one used to analyse results from a wind tunnel. They use thermal imaging, P-NMR on muscles during load to optimise pre-even training, etc. They have something like 200+ PhDs a year in sports related biochemistry, medicine, physiology and a few other related fields all working in that sports institute (sorry forgot the name).
You don't suppose that with all those resources they could do something to make soccer interesting or (God forbid) entertaining?
Americans don't like soccer because of the lack of scoring, the ties, and the diving. Feigning mortal injury with sub-high school histrionics as your teammates smite their brows at the tragic death of one so young, then popping up as though nothing had happened, is just unseemly.