Canada to Study a Mysterious Curling ‘Frankenbroom' | Hacker News Reader

Canada to Study a Mysterious Curling ‘Frankenbroom'

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60 pointsmhb18 comments

There are always lines to be drawn - this is "in" or this is "out". Are performance enhancing drugs in or out of Baseball? What about catamarans in the America's Cup or Oscar Pistorius' running blades. Or more interestingly the running blades on a non-paralympic athlete's legs?

Researching technology and techniques to determine if they are good for the sport like the Curling Federation is doing is little different from the MLBA deciding on whether wood, metal, or corked and testing the effects on the game.

I'm not sure the manufacturing changes "improved" the sport so much as "changed" it which could be good, bad, or indifferent depending on the team, skill, strengths, and weaknesses. But testing and understanding the changes is a worthwhile goal.

The only thing that surprises me is how long it apparently took for Curling to have its "aluminum bat" moment.

This is old news, new rules came out as a result this month: http://www.curling.ca/blog/2016/09/11/curling-canada-adopts-...

For an article about how revolutionary these brooms are it would have been helpful for a description of how they can be used to vastly improve a bad throw. Or do some weird turns. Maybe a video even.

> a scientific mystery that is rattling the foundations of curling

I'm Canadian and it was hard to not wonder if I was reading the Onion

Spot the fake Canuck.

(He didn't apologise.)

(I'm sorry.)

"World Sweeping Summit"

Ha ha ... only in Canada.

It's actually a great sport, you can play until you're 100.

This would be Canada's version of Australia II's 'winged keel' ?? ;)

How can something be "too good for the sport" is beyond me. I get that it makes comparing the past to the present, but it literally based on the description in the story made it seem like the changes were improving the "sport" on the competition.

"How can something be "too good for the sport" is beyond me"

Here is a similar, but possibly easier to understand, example that would revolutionize/kill the sport of shooting: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/17000-linux-powered-r....

A later article (http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/08/gun-linux-on-the-rang...) wrote:

"my photojournalist buddy Steven Michael nailed a target at 1,008 yards—about 0.91 kilometers—on his first try, in spite of never having fired a rifle before"

The first person using such a gun in shooting competitions would probably be called a genius in the sport, but soon every competitor would use it, and nobody would miss anymore.

The curling situation is similar in the sense that, if this were allowed, curling players no longer need to have good control of direction, speed, and spin of the stones they throw.

> “It got a little out of hand this season where it became more of a line-calling game and a sweeping game as opposed to a throwing game,” explained Miskew. “We don’t want it to be about the fabric on your broom head. We want it to be about throwing it [the rock] well.”

So it sounds like they make the throwing part of the game "obsolete" since the sweepers have so much control that it doesn't matter how bad the throw was. So it's unbalancing the game in unexpected ways.

Nerf OP broom.

Sports regulation deals a lot with what's the 'heart' of the sport. ie what's the skill that's supposed to be on display, in this case curling is mainly about the throwers skills and the new materials made that much less important. Another goal of regulations is also making a leveler playing field where competitions don't come down to who could afford the most advanced tools.

i guess that if curling becomes too easy, the team who has the last stone would always win, unless they are amateurs. Kinda like if it was possible to check mate in the first move in chess, so that whoever started first would win.

side note, i think sport is too professional. And that it might actually be more fun for amateurs if they could curl better.

It totally changes the game and it's even worse on an amateur level. Professionals are making 80-90% of their shots, and the sweeping techniques were pushing that percentage higher. However, amateurs are only making 50% of their shots, and this technique/fabric can make a shot go from a miss to a perfect hit. Although the WCF did rule that for local bonspiels (tournaments), any fabric can be used so this discussion for the amateur level is quite moot.

A metaphor is a baseball bat that allows a player to hit a home run every swing.

Don't be silly. The sport is about improving players skill, not technology. The brushes, like aluminum bats in the MLB basically provide so much of an advantage that the skill factor is reduced significantly.

I mean we could have robots play the game perfectly and that would be a lot less fun... or at the least a fundamentally different sport.

> Don't be silly.

Please edit personal swipes out of comments here. Your comment would be just fine without that.

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