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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who’s never been able to appreciate or follow sports where a machine can be an order of magnitude better than a human, I would genuinely like to understand why people are enamored about such sports. In the end it seems like brilliant minds lost in math that’s not even novel anymore.. again everyone should do what they please, but this is just an academic question from someone unable to appreciate such skills or sports.

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Why care about racing when a motor vehicle can do travel at speed better, by that logic?

Boxing vs. gun fight. Fencing vs. well, gun fight. Swimming vs. motorboats? Bobsleigh vs... gravity?

In most sports it's possible to find a machine that does it better/faster, but sports are about humans measuring themselves against one another, not against a machine.

There are still quite a bit of sports where machines can’t compete, like tennis or soccer.

The guy from "Stuff Made Here" builds all sorts of sports machines: a gun-powered golf club, a basketball hoop that's impossible to miss, etc. I think he would be able to make a tennis playing machine that aces every single service shot (if he's not working on that already! ;-)

A very easy way to do it would just be to serve the ball at > 400km/h. It's unlikely that a human could accurately return a ball at that speed more than 50% of the time.

I don’t know the rules of tennis well enough, but would it be enough to just have an unreturnable serve to win, even if you can’t return anything yourself?

no, you have to win by two games. So you have to be able to win once with your opponent serving.

> (if he's not working on that already! ;-)

Right now he seems to be occupied with his automatic puzzle solver. Based on the first video it looks like it'll take a while.

Only if you consider that the machine should act like a human player. We can definitely build machines that beat humans in both tennis and soccer every single time.

How would that soccer player look? I don’t think we can build a machine that is good at soccer.

Once you remove the requirement that it look or act like a human, there's plenty of (pointless) ways you could make robots beat humans at football. A drone could pick up the ball and fly it into the goal without breaking the rules because the rules assume that to carry the ball it would need to touch your hands or arms (which the drone doesn't have). Build another robot that's the exact size of the goal, and too heavy to move off the goal line, hey presto the other team can't score.

I think this line of thinking only makes sense if either you do require the robots to behave like humans (opposite of the comment you replied to), or by rewriting the rules of the game completely.

But then it wouldn't be soccer any more. Of course you could just build a high wall over the field so the opponents are physically prohibited to score. I'm quite sure that still is prohibited, even if you call the wall a player.

I don't think you need the players to look like humans, but you have to in some way keep the spirit of the game. For example, you can't pick up the ball and hold it while you move, but have to roll or bounce it in front of yourself (dribble).

That's my point, that for it to make sense they either need to be restricted to acting like humans or the rules of the game need to be updated to suit robots in which case it's not the same sport any more, even if the rules are changed to keep it as close to human football as possible as you suggest.

*yet.

Also used to be true for chess.

Good question... Why should we care?

It's like "okay, here we have a bunch of genetically gifted people who spend their whole lives training for that. Why should we care whether someone can run 100m in less than 10s or not? What difference does it make to any of us if Usain Bolt is the fastest man to run the 200m on a very controlled environment?"

This is not to say that running as an activity is useless, or that we should give up on exercising. I don't know if that is the point from OP, but I myself do question why we collectively think that is so important to devote so much time and resources in trying to optimize for these crazy, arbitrarily-constrained scenarios that we call "sports".

The answer is entertainment. I don’t care about any sports (though after a brief stint in watching LoL esports around 2011-2014, I at least understand the theoretical appeal), but many people do. Others don’t care about music. Or about films. But in the end all of it is bread and games.

Entertainment works as an answer of why we do it, but not the question I made, which is why/whether we should.

This is only a distinction if you consider entertainment without value

Not really. I am questioning "sports following as entertainment", not entertainment in general.

Your argument is valid, but it should be noted that the best autonomous racing cars in the world would get absolutely trounced by even amateur racing drivers.

Why was that dog/bunny puzzle at the top of HN's frontpage yesterday? How were so many people entertained by it, when a computer could have solved it in microseconds?

Humans like puzzle games, for some intrinsic reason. Chess is a very large and addictive puzzle.

Aren't machines better than humans at most sports? Hand off a football to an Abrams tank and it's not getting tackled on its way to the goal line.

Absolutely. That’s why I’ve never been able to follow or watch any sport. Except maybe Ronny Sullivan playing snooker? Anyways the point is I have never been able to appreciate the value of sports as something you watch.

Why throw javelins when intercontinental missiles exists?

To be fair, athletes throwing ICBMs would really up the excitement of the Olympics.

Numan Athletics was an arcade game that played up this angle: https://youtu.be/X2K3hs7AUhQ

Would you say it doesn't make sense to appreciate art because cameras exist?

Actually, with the advent of image generating AIs, such questions become more relevant.

Imagine a book, a ballet choreography, a movie entirely conceived and produced by an AI, which we collectively regard it as "art". Also imagine that, barring evidence of how the work was done, it is impossible for humans to distinguish if the work of art was produced by a human or an AI.

Why should we, as "appreciators/consumers" of this art, care about how it was done? Do we think that a drawing made with the help with a computer "less artistic" than one drawn on paper?

Also imagine that this AI is friendly and superhuman, and it is established that its works are aligned with our interests. All "art" produced by this AI inspires us to be better version of ourselves and enlighten us to help us solve our conflicts. In this scenario, why should we care about the work of one particular human vs another?

The point that I am trying to make is that chess is already a reduced version of this hypothetical. Those that care about chess as a game will have little to learn by looking at humans. Those that want to improve their own game will do it by playing against/studying/interacting with the advancements in computers. There is very little left room for humans by themselves to show any new development in the game. As such, it seems to me that the ones interested in events related to human players are those who worry more about measuring humans against each other than in the game itself.

I think competitive sports are and always have been about competition between humans, and I don't believe that the ability of a machine to play chess better than any human changes that, any more than the fact that, say, a hare can outsprint a human, or a horse outrun one in any middle distance, makes foot racing intrinsically uninteresting.

In addition, humans enjoy playing games, and I think this extends to watching or following other humans who are better at it as a vicarious means of participating. A Saturday poker game with your crew is not diminished by the fact that everyone in the game would be slaughtered in a professional tournament, nor is the fun of watching said tournament diminished by that knowledge. I can enjoy a game of flag football with my family, and still enjoy an NFL Monday Night game, even though no one in my family would last 2 plays in the latter.

That’s like saying why watch 100m sprint when we have formula 1.

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