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Go For It On Fourth Down? Ask Coach Watson
jbrodkin writes "If humans can't beat a computer at 'Jeopardy!' why should we trust them to make the right call on fourth down in the Super Bowl? That was the fundamental question asked by some researchers at the recent MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. With thousands of variables to consider on the basketball court or other fields of play, it only makes sense to let computers handle questions of strategy, says Tarek Kamil, whose company built a chip-containing basketball which takes 6,000 measurements per second. 'Fifty years from now, we're going to laugh about how we used to give coaches this much responsibility,' he says."
But the Super Bowl and Fourth down are football things. Not basketball things.
As for sports at the upper levels, there is more involved than merely picking the correct play. You need not only the play, but the execution of it. Coaches do far more than just come up with strategy, they also, as the name implies, COACH.
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Why should we even let humans obey the orders? Machines can do it more efficienty.
And then why do we need to do it in the physical world? It might be more interesting if there's no gravity, or higher gravity or something.
So the entertainment of the future will involve us seeing computers play video games in front of us.
If both teams relied solely on computer models to make the decision, both teams would likely know whether an attempt on 4th down would be attempted. There would almost never be an unexpected attempt, and the only unaccounted variable would be the actual play to be run on the attempt, which could also be predicted relatively accurately by considering coach play calling tendencies.
Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. - Albert Einstein
We as a people stopped growing intellectually at about the time we started allowing money to make our decisions for us.
Ten posts down from the top! Well, I expected the typical "DURR DURR Americans DURR stupid DURR I can't get it in my Eurohead that another culture might do something differently that Us Good People DURR" post to be a lot farther up. Good job though, without you we might have had a story about football where someone didn't point this out.
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I'll take xenophobia for 800.
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The robots will be laughing at the robot faction that claims there were once biological beings on the planet.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
That comment is far more insightful than you probably meant for it to be. The current generation of coaches learned to coach without computers. In a few years, the next generation will include people like you that have also played video game versions. With the accuracy of video game simulations improving all the time, more coaches will trust the instincts that they've learned are reliable in the video games, and the typical coaching strategy will change.
Take it a step further (which some NFL team will), and get a good video game (i.e., simulation) that includes the stats on all the players on both the home and opposing teams, and run lots of plays in the week before the game to see which ones tend to work better than usual with the expected lineups.
Baseball has long been a numbers game, primarily because so much of the game is a matter of batter vs. pitcher, so it's relatively easy to quantify. It's just a matter of time before other sports follow.
They have downs in Canadian and American Football, American Football is played in Europe, Japan and Mexico.
Jeopardy has been internationalized since 1964 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_versions_of_Jeopardy!
And as many people watch the Super Bowl outside the US as watch in the US, so it's not that "US-biased".
Any coaches not already using computers to help with their strategy are doing themselves a huge disservice. I'm sure they are already crunching all the statistics they have, like how often a 4th down conversion works and using that to help with strategy.
However, I'm not sure this microchip does anything that anybody is interested in. It probably costs a fortune too, and they're putting it in a ball that's going to get knocked around? I'm sure the NBA is not sold on paying a lot of money to find out, as the article mentions, whether Johnny is 14% more dominant with his right hand than his left. And useful stats like "Time of Possession" will still have to be done by a human.
In fact, I can't think of a single stat important enough for a microchip in a ball to transmit in real time, and even if it was, it transmits to BOTH coaches. It's in the ball, so it creates somewhat of an arms race and just creates more information and work for the coaches to consider.
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I research AI for strategy.
A computer is really good at finding optimal strategies if you can properly quantify relevant variables. In sport there is advantage in not taking an optimal strategy, because your opponent won't know which non optimal strategy you've chosen until it's too late. If you're going to use randomness to determine which strategy to use, then the computer is no better than a coach.
That assumes, probably wrongly, that you can quantify what's going on. Is that opposing quarterback's limp important, a fake, how serious is it (numerically)? Even if a computer is good at predicting one particular game, (say the superbowl) that would be based on the data from the whole of the rest of the season to assess how good the players are.
There's a lot of sport to be had in running AI's against each other, especially based on the same sets of data and see what they do. But that is a *very* different problem from actually simulating a real match, yes, the average of 10000 trials may be correct, but there are only a few real games, not thousands. That randomness, sportmanship, and people doing extraordinary, unexpected and great (or stupid) things is what separates a real match from a statistical model.