Cricket is changing for many reasons, one of which is AI | Hacker News Reader

Cricket is changing for many reasons, one of which is AI

fiftytwo.in

63 pointsrustoo36 comments

The famous “Rules of (Test) cricket as explained to a foreigner”, anonymously penned decades ago, resemble GPT-3 prose.

“You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that's in the side that's in goes out, and when he's out he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out. When they are all out, the side that's out comes in and the side thats been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out. When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game!”

The best cricket stats site is still CricInfo, going strong after 29 years. Though AI is leading to predictive services like CricViz, CricInfo has the edge with its human side.

As an European, I watched, and enjoyed, 3 baseball movies and one 52 episode anime about baseball, and I still don't understand the rules. When you watch the football (soccer), after 5 minutes the game is obvious, put ball into the goal. But baseball? The only thing I was able to deduct is that pitcher is similar to a goalkeeper, he cannot score but if he screw up they can loose a point.

As another European, how is the concept of Baseball hard? Person A throws ball, Person B tries to hit Ball. If Ball Is Hit, Person B tries to run around the field before other team gets you out.

Admittedly I grew up in Norway and the UK and both countries have reasonably popular games that are very similar to baseball, so that probably helps.

Soccer is obvious? Explain the details of the “offside” rule to us USAmericans again?

Which is not to say that the concept of baseball’s “forced base” isn’t incomprehensible to Europeans, never mind “tagging up”. And don’t even bother with the infield fly rule.

A player is in offside when there's one or fewer opposing players in front of them (when looking towards the opposing goal). A player is not allowed to gain an advantage whilst they are offside.

Offside is a lot easier to understand than the whole rules of Baseball.

Morning sunshine, blue sky, lush green outfield, brown pitch, dark red ball, white jerseys, nervous batsman at strike hoping to hold the fort till the ball loses its shine, main pacer with a long run up hoping to exploit the green top on the pitch and get some bounce and swing.. thus begins the first day of a Test match!

The article might have been better served by using Hawk-eye as an example.

The technology behind Hawk-eye started out as television gimmick, back in 2001, to show cricket fans the ball trajectory for a LBW call.

Now it is being used for challenging line calls in tennis and checking goals in football. It has evolved into a useful case for other sports. While in cricket it still leads to some controversial umpiring in instances called "umpires call" where Hawk-eye prediction falls in a 50-50 probability range.

DRS (Hawk-eye + Ultraedge) has transformed cricket in my opinion. Where before, one erring umpire can change the course of a game, now there is the option to challenge calls. And guess what, if you land up in that 50-50 umpire's call territory, you don't lose the challenge, which is fair.

Compare this to the officiating in a modern NBA game and it is night and day. Refs have made NBA games almost unwatchable IMHO. Even if you win a coach's challenge, you don't get to retain it, forcing the coach to keep the challenge for crunch time even if a foul-call is egregious.

Yeah good point -- and AFAIK, cricket is the only sport in which Hawk-Eye is used predictively, i.e., attempts to show what could have happened if the batter hadn't obstructed the path of the ball.

Every other sport that uses Hawk-Eye only uses it to show what already happened.

That is incorrect. Hawk-eye shows the most likely path in all the sports with 3.6 mm margin for error.

The issue is that other sports don't deal with a 50-50 probability decision.

In tennis, if the ball is 50% on the line and 50% outside the line it is still "in".

That is not the case with LBW decision. If the ball is hitting 50% on the stumps and 50% outside theb both sides can argue their case. So, often it is left as "umpire's call".

It's interesting the extent to which the players trust Hawkeye. Particularly in the tennis, there is no more McEnroe screaming the ball was on the line. The computer says it was out and that's the end of the matter.

The only thing interesting in this is the batting analysis. There is obviously an equal amount that can be done with bowling as well. I am sure someone is doing it, but there is no mention of it in the article. The other product where they are trying to sell stuff in real time has been tried many times and it never works.

In some ways this is a disappointing article for me. NBA tracks every single player and every single shot on the court for the duration of the match. A lot of interesting data can be obtained and used with this. There is a lot of tech and data analysis in baseball and NFL too. I was hoping something similar about cricket will talked about in the article but kind of falls flat for me. May be all the analysis in cricket is done by the "eye test", as they say in basketball commentary, still.

If you've never seen cricket but you enjoy baseball, give it a shot. I watched it for the first time a few years back with some Indian guys I worked with (helps if someone can explain the rules) and it is a lot of fun. Try T20, it's about the length/pace of an MLB baseball game.

Big shout-out to jomboy media (https://www.youtube.com/c/jomboyvideos) for explaining Cricket using Baseball terms.

+100 if they manage to explain the LBW law using baseball terms

I would explain it as "hit by pitch" in baseball, but it counts against the batter instead of the pitcher (bowler). In baseball terms, both the batter and pitcher are more mobile, so the batter has a responsibility to get out of the way or reposition to make the hit / protect the wickets, so it makes sense in both cases.

I've had some success explaining it as "baseball, but 360 degrees and most things are a hit instead of an out". In MLB the best batters have a batting average of something like north of .300 while in cricket you're probably looking at something above .900

Haha yea that's pretty good.

How about the "if it pitches outside leg it can't be out" part ?

This. T20 cricket is super entertaining.

I can't watch test matches or even ODI, but T20 is super fun. The limited overs encourage action in a way the other formats don't. Batters are aggressive, death bowling is a thing, way better than baseball IMO.

Test cricket is also technically limited overs, but it has immensely more strategic aspect to it spanning 5 days with 2 innings each.

It's essentially not limited overs because of how long each innings is though. The threat of losing all your wickets is too high resulting in extremely defensive batting and extremely boring matches.

Innings are limited by both time and number (2 maximum each, but could technically be zero for one side), but I'm pretty sure overs are limited only by time.

In one day, on statistcal average, ~90 overs are bowled. The day can be safely divided into 3 sessions equally. If spinners are bowling in majority, this number could extend to 100 overs per day as well.

On a strategic aspect, the players have to change their styles from slow to fast or fast to slow given these hidden limits.

Once I tried to explain to an coworker about Cricket:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cricket/comments/lq2zh3/cricket_in_...

Be warned though, T20 is the gateway to "real" cricket aka. 5 day Test matches (which often, even after 5 days, end in a draw) ;-)

Test cricket is going through its best phase in a long time with a lot more results than draws. Even when draws happen, they are usually very entertaining which wasn’t the case before.

There is no such thing as test matches being "real" cricket, at least not anymore. T20, ODI and Test cricket are just different flavours of the same sport, differing slightly in rules and duration of matches. T20s, the shortest versions of cricket, have taken over as the more entertaining and palatable form of the game.

It's not just about duration. It's the hardest format in every sense. Test cricket is the format which provides an opportunity for players to reach their full potential. It's what separates great players from the good.

Indian batting great Sachin Tendulkar was going through a bad phase in 2003-04 Test series in Australia. In the first 3 Test matches his scores read 0, 1, 37, 0, 44. He was dismissed consistently playing cover drive outside the off stump. There was a lot of pressure on him going into the final Test match in Sydney. He showed why he is one of the greatest to ever play cricket. He played a genius of an innings for two days where he didn't play a single cover drive shot outside the off stump as planned by him. He scored 241 and remained not out. This is not something you get to witness in an ODI or a T20. Test is indeed the real cricket.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_P8fpLsi-A

You can compare T20, OneDay and Test cricket to Classical, Rapid, Blitz and Bullet chess. At the highest level, players consider them to be completely different games needing different strategies.

Test cricket is real in the sense that it is the original game and what we have been calling as cricket until the relatively recent introduction of ODIs and T20s. The shorter formats eliminate the aspects of playing with changing conditions (ball, pitch and weather) which deeply characterized the original game.

I agree with the fact that there is no "real" cricket but it is not as simple as different rules and duration. T20 relies on momentum, a bit of luck and different set of skills compared to Test matches. That is why you often see teams like West Indies or Afghanistan which can compete with any big teams in a T20 match struggle in Tests.

Analogy: tweets are more palatable than novels.

Everything but Test cricket just isnt cricket

r/cricket is leaking

The power-bat technology was invented by a Boston company, Divinio - https://divinio.ai/ It uses some very clever tech to process/send the required large amounts of data quickly so that the results are usefully quick.

The ball tracking technology is from Animation Research, a New Zealand company. https://arl.co.nz/

From the article it’s unclear to me what AI has to do with these measurement data. It more reads like an advertisement for Azure.

Please enlighten me if I misunderstand or misread.

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