
What If We Had Perfect Robot Referees? - jonbaer
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-had-perfect-robot-referees
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LeifCarrotson
> Watching at home, the Hawk-Eye appears to be a precise, schematic account of
> what just happened in a tennis match, tracking the ball in flight and then
> zooming down to the service line or the base line to show whether the shot
> has landed in or out. But what Hawk-Eye actually does is anticipate where a
> ball should land, triangulating the most likely outcome based on visual
> tracking of its trajectory. Despite the appearance of microscopic accuracy,
> the system at the time still assumed a margin of error of about 3.6
> millimetres.

That's exactly what"tracking the ball in flight" means. And 3.6 mm is pretty
much the thickness of the fuzz on the ball. No human can measure or control
the ball to that level of accuracy!

And tennis, and this system, is exactly the kind of sport which should use
this tech. You need to answer the question of whether the ball was in or out
frequently, accurately, and quickly, and the tech does that. Same with strike
zone baseball cameras.

I agree that it's unfair to referees of basketball or football (especially
American football) to compare their instant judgement of a highly dynamic game
to minutes of footage from all angles, at high resolution, and at high frame
rates. There is more to analyze than where the ball is. Tech would basically
need a team of dozens of analysts watching each player from each angle to
catch everything in real time that the talking heads can pick apart for the
next week.

