

How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team - charrington
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/09/13/the-electronic-coach/

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Perceval
Reminds me a little bit about this article on Shane Battier:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?_r=1)

It goes into how Battier gets to see the charts and statistics for the players
on the opposing team, so that he'll have better odds when defending against
their jump shots.

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mrud
best part:

fed to an ibm computer, capable of making 50k calculations per _minute_

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dfield
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671519>

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scrrr
I think nowadays such analysis plays a big part in sports. For example when
Germany's football team beat Argentina in this year's World Cup I couldn't
help but think that the German coach knows something the other coach
(legendary Diego Maradona) doesn't.

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spinchange
I lack specific examples or links, but had heard a few years ago that U.S. pro
sports franchises like the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots, to think
of two, use a lot of "Quant" analysis in addition to traditional coaching
methods. I'm sure everyone is doing it across pro sports now.

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ybot
Interestingly enough, Bloomberg has started offering "Quant" tools to MLB
teams: <http://www.bloombergsports.com/proofferings/>

They specialize in providing data and analytics on financial data. Clearly
they didn't think it was too much of a leap to go from analyzing securities to
analyzing baseball players.

As far as specific links, the Red Sox employ Bill James
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James>), who is a fairly famous
statistician, to help them run the team. He invented Sabermetrics, "the
analysis of baseball through objective evidence".
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics>)

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nocman
Jerry Lucas used his own memory system and his personal collection of data on
opponents to his advantage during his extremely successful basketball career.

The video at the following link discusses it briefly. At the moment I can't
find any more detailed discussion of it.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK6yf3qaT4A>

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knarf_navillus
Is the K in Knuth supposed to be pronounced?

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xtacy
From: <http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/faq.html>

It's pronounced: Ka-NOOTH

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zackattack
Knuth seems very tall. I wonder if he plays basketball as a hobby.

