[HN Gopher] 'AI-powered judge' takes boxing closer to brave new ...
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'AI-powered judge' takes boxing closer to brave new world it
appears to seek
Author : pseudolus
Score : 49 points
Date : 2024-12-21 11:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.boxingscene.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.boxingscene.com)
| philip1209 wrote:
| Can it also detect traumatic brain injuries?
| ianbooker wrote:
| Most sports would profit from a deeper understanding and
| application of statistical inference. Or even of descriptive
| statistics. The fun lays in the operationalization, a step most
| applications of AI will likely omit, since AI will work out the
| dimensions of the data by itself.
|
| Boxing for example could calculate the amount of kinetic energy
| brought to the table and how much of it landed or was
| sidestepped. How much was absorbed? Not easy to do, but also not
| impossible.
| lazide wrote:
| Frankly, boxing fans seem the least likely to care?
| shadowerm wrote:
| No, this is a stupid idea for people who don't know anything
| about boxing.
|
| Effective aggression and ring generalship are subjective
| human judgements. Boxing results are varied because in a
| championship fight, many times rounds will be completely
| subjective.
|
| If you made boxing judged by AI, the rules would quickly be
| gamed. I suspect it would turn into a contest of jab/output
| and completely ruin boxing.
|
| What ultimately makes boxing great is a fight today doesn't
| look that much different than a fight 100 years ago. That is
| the whole fun of it.
|
| It is a really a symptom of a culture obsessed with
| scientism. As if adding a bullshit layer of scientism makes
| things somehow better and "smarter".
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I don't understand. Why would an AI judge inherently be
| more perceptible to being gamed than a human judge?
| sbelskie wrote:
| I believe the argument would be that humans are
| inconsistent, fallible, and gameable in idiosyncratic and
| individual ways not that they are less susceptible than
| AI.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Computer systems fail systematically, humans fail more
| randomly (for most classes of failure)
| meiraleal wrote:
| > humans fail more randomly
|
| And often intentionally
| notahacker wrote:
| Yep. The in-a-nutshell argument for AI is that there's an
| unusual amount of bias and corruption in boxing judges,
| who usually determine the victor. The in-a-nutshell
| argument against is that less subjective scoring systems
| like punch counting have already been tried as an
| alternative in Olympic boxing, but fans didn't like the
| adaptations in style that resulted. (Of course, dropping
| the punch counting for the 2016 Olympics immediately
| resulted in subjective judgements that were _interesting_
| at best...)
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Sure but then you at least have basis to complain instead
| of "that's just how the game is now."
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I don't see why we would need to say that, when we can
| debug and fix the system.
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| Not sure this holds, especially given the context of
| boxing, which is notorious for corruption.
| harimau777 wrote:
| A computer can only judge based on things that can be
| measured. Martial arts (and really sports in general)
| rely heavily on things that can't be measured such as
| aggression, spirit, toughness, etc.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I count myself as a pretty decent fan of boxing. To argue
| that the rules are not already being gamed is pretty
| shallow. Winning by points is pretty much standard.
| Providing one additional judge that auto-tallies wouldn't
| kill the sport.
|
| And I do believe the sport would benefit from, say, 3d
| reprojection to see a different view, or a heat map of hit
| vs throw locations, or a reproduction of movement
| throughout the ring.
|
| Other sports have had these deep stats for a long time, and
| boxing has what, jab counts, points, and knockdowns? Come
| on. I love the sport and I love data.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| A toubling aspect of the "bullshit scientism" is that
| confidence/belief in "AI" seems proportional to human
| mistrust of other humans. Therefore it's success rests on
| fomenting division and mistrust amongst people and
| iconoclasm of traditional skills/knowledge. _Artificial_ (
| "intelligence") is, in it's very definition, deceptive.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Good comment. When we parse, data science, and algo a
| barely structured brawl, sports are donezo and we get too
| far away finally from being human.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > ...completely subjective.
|
| That may be. But all the gamblers demand objectivity.
| Whether or not this technology provides objectivity is not
| knowable now, but it has the empathetic storytelling that
| it does, which is all that matters for the marginal
| gambler.
| bsder wrote:
| > If you made boxing judged by AI, the rules would quickly
| be gamed.
|
| I though boxers were _already_ gaming rules and this is
| effectively what gave rise to stuff like MMA.
|
| Fans got tired of seeing a victor based upon technicality
| and skill and rules. Fans wanted a victor based upon being
| _beaten down_.
|
| It's kind of interesting in that I'm not that interested in
| this for boxing but would rather see these kinds of systems
| in stuff like gymnastics or ice skating. Gymnastics and ice
| skating get absolutely skewered for the fact that you have
| to be "politically connected" in order to score well over
| time. I suspect that having an AI scoring system that winds
| up scoring performances correctly regardless of political
| connection would be godsend to those kinds of sports.
| hash872 wrote:
| >Boxing for example could calculate the amount of kinetic
| energy brought to the table and how much of it landed or was
| sidestepped. How much was absorbed? Not easy to do, but also
| not impossible
|
| It would be pretty difficult to do in a combat sport without
| sensors. As I understand it fencing has participants' blades
| wired up for this exact reason. How would you measure how hard
| a punch landed from a distance? You could put sensors in the
| gloves, but some of the time the punches bounce off the
| opponent's forearms, so you could get a false 'powerful' rating
| from a blocked punch.
|
| Worse, some of the best punches aren't the most powerful in a
| kinetic sense, but just happen to very accurately land in the
| right spot on an opponent's chin. Or they're well timed and the
| opponent doesn't see it coming, so their surprise makes the
| strike more damaging. Even if you could precisely measure punch
| impact to the head from a distance, you'd be missing out on
| some excellent punches that are less powerful but set up by
| accuracy & timing. So yes it's basically impossible to measure
| in any way but subjectively
| Retric wrote:
| F=MA Several very high speed and high resolution video
| cameras could collect all this information based on how
| glove, forearm, head, etc accelerate/rotate in real time.
|
| You don't need to process it all in real time. A blow by blow
| after round highlights real based on the most damaging blows
| could grow the sport by making it more interesting to watch
| lesser matches.
| hash872 wrote:
| The discussion was about scoring. In order to score the
| fight, you do need to process it in somewhat real time. I
| don't think waiting a few days to find out who won is going
| to be acceptable to fans
| Retric wrote:
| Sure, which is why AI scoring is a more difficult problem
| than creating an automatic instant replay with
| approximate forces.
|
| I'm still thinking minutes here which kind of blurs the
| long with real time scoring.
| teeray wrote:
| You could probably do it acoustically to some degree. A
| punch is going to violently displace some air
| proportionately to its impact.
|
| Also, It might be undetectably negligible, but it would be
| an interesting experiment to see if a sufficiently
| sensitive thermal camera would be able to gather
| information on how much the air is getting compressed in
| advance of a punch.
| harimau777 wrote:
| There's a lot more to it than just measuring force. For an
| extreme example, imagine delivering the same punch (force,
| target, etc.) to Mike Tyson in his prime versus a 90 year
| old lady.
| Retric wrote:
| People who know how to absorbed and redirect a blow
| minimize how much their brain gets tossed about, but
| measuring peak acceleration of the skill is going to show
| how much someone's brain got rattled. It's a solid
| structure and your brain is inside
|
| Also a you don't see 90 year old grandmother's in the
| ring. So it's true someone with a larger head has an
| advantage here, but mechanical properties of tissues
| should be fairly similar between fighters and
| acceleration accounts for the mass of the head.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| You mentioned fencing: the electronic scoring system in
| fencing is pretty primitive, and has not at all replaced the
| need for a referee. It determines whether a hit has landed,
| and that's about it. Unfortunately the sport still has a big
| problem with how subjective the refereeing is (particularly
| in sabre, which is my weapon), and that's driving corruption
| at the highest levels [1].
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/world/europe/fencing-
| olym...
| harimau777 wrote:
| Modern fencing is also just about the worst case scenario
| for a martial art being watered down in the name of sports.
| At this point it's basically glorified tag.
| jdietrich wrote:
| Accurately assessing the quantity and quality of punches
| landed is entirely tractable. If you can accurately track the
| movement of each fighter's joints (plausible with camera-
| based CV, almost trivial with LIDAR) then you're just solving
| a fairly straightforward dynamics problem. A well-timed hook
| or uppercut to the chin is more damaging for predictable
| biomechanical reasons - rotational trauma causes more damage
| than translational trauma because it results in greater shear
| forces within the brain, particularly the brain stem. It
| isn't a massively more difficult problem than the doppler
| radar systems used to track ball movement in sports like golf
| and baseball.
|
| I think the harder problem is assessing the subjective
| factors mentioned by shadowerm, but that's also a hard
| problem for human judges.
| soared wrote:
| Some sports ready have - baseball and golf famously record
| effectively every action any player does. American Football
| makes a lot of claims/hype but we don't get access to data like
| in baseball/golf.
| mistermann wrote:
| Geopolitics and many other extremely important domains would
| too.
|
| I think it is going to become increasingly difficult to keep
| the various manufactured illusions our culture is composed of
| together. Hopefully the transition isn't too tumultuous.
| goatlover wrote:
| Analytics has arguably made basketball worse, where everyone
| stands around the 3 point line, and the offense is mostly
| trying to shoot a 3 or go to the rim. Game used to be more
| diverse.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I'm not sure that's realistically possible. The effect of a
| punch is going to depend on where exactly it landed, the angle
| of the punch, whether it landed solidly or glanced off, whether
| the person receiving the punch rolled with it, the physiology
| of the person receiving the punch, what punches the person has
| already received, how the person receiving the punch breaths,
| etc.
|
| Debatably there's other factors that should also factor into a
| judge's decision such as how aggressive a fighter is.
| 1659447091 wrote:
| Baseball already does this for things like sprint speed, bat
| speed, contact point, attack angle, exit velocity, and launch
| angle with Weather Applied Metrics added to show how the wind
| robbed your team of a home run. For pitches there is
| trajectory, release point, spin axis, seam orientation. Then on
| defense, a players starting location and their path distance
| speed to the ball, catch probability and arm strength. That's
| not even all of it. MLB parks have many multiple high frame
| rate cameras installed along with their own datacenters. They
| are also working on replacing the umpire & strike zone with an
| Automated Ball/Strike System (ABS); which I am personally not
| to happy about--that would be like taking those awkward fist-
| fights out of hockey.
|
| https://technology.mlblogs.com
| robertlagrant wrote:
| All that, while very cool technology, is going to be much
| simpler than judging how hard a punch hit. You could gauge
| how fast a punch was with the same sort of tech as that, but
| how well it connected, and how much force was applied, are
| much more difficult.
| magic_man wrote:
| The ai judge scored it 118-112. Usyk won the fight, but maybe by
| 2-3 rounds and not 6. Boxing is way too subjective.
| whycombagator wrote:
| I had it 116-112 and had the first as a swing round that I gave
| to fury. To me it was usyk controlling the fight. The
| commentators would have you believe otherwise. Remember that,
| when ring side, fights look different depending on where you
| sit, which could explain some of this.
|
| Deep Strike was only run on only the public feed and not a quad
| feed as is preferred.
| yzydserd wrote:
| I didn't see it mentioned in the article but rumours are the tech
| is DeepStrike by the Danish company Jabbr.
|
| https://jabbr.ai/deepstrike
|
| Fury's expletive laden review (video):
| https://www.sportbible.com/boxing/boxing-news/tyson-fury-ole...
|
| > "Absolutely s*t. Here's what, f*k all the computers. Keep the
| humans going. More jobs for humans, less jobs for computers. And
| f*k electric cars too while we're at it."
| kristianc wrote:
| The AI appeared to be absolutely right, however. There wasn't a
| single round where Fury landed more punches.
| parodysbird wrote:
| Are we sure the CompuBox punch stats weren't part of the
| input for the model after each round?
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| They should put impact sensors inside the the gloves and use
| those readings to flash points on the screen video game style.
| bjourne wrote:
| Too easy to game since the sensor couldn't detect where the
| glove hit.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Watching two boxers hit themselves and the floor would be
| quite funny.
|
| Fencing manages to detect a touch, so this combined with a
| force sensor could be a pretty neat idea.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| Congrats this website features a video where it provides the same
| as an audio only interview. But if you scroll down or up it
| stops. If you leave the tab it stops. Thanks for nothing. I hate
| the internet. Stop forcing me to change my behavior when you are
| the one who is wrong.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't complain about tangential annoyances--e.g.
| article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button
| breakage. They're too common to be interesting._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| julianeon wrote:
| For a sport as impure as boxing, I feel like there's nothing left
| to lose. We might as well use it as a test bed for experimental
| ideas.
| tolerance wrote:
| Ah. The dissolution of the 'the sweet science' by a science that
| is indifferent to taste. AI continues to draw attention to both
| the flaws that age-old customs accumulate over time and remind us
| of the more intimate aspects that have been lost as custom turns
| into commodity.
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