Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.