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."

Hey while we're there...

[Haedrian]

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.

Human element needed

[kenrblan]

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.