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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

Why not have a pitching machine? And a hitting robot?

Do you watch baseball for the umps? To see them show their 99percentile talent at calling balls/strikes?

Human error just makes the game more interesting and less predictable.

Ridiculous. You're conflating human error as part of the skills in the game itself (failing to catch a pop fly) versus human error that results in inconsistencies of rules (marking a pitch as a strike when it is quantifiably outside the strike zone). One of these makes the game more interesting, the other one makes it more frustrating.

Can you guess which one is which, or should I call for a ref?

The solution is to win by a wider margin. Or schmooze the refs!

Human error in judgment doesn't.

Yeah, it does.

F1 also has their disputes with rulings by their committee. All part of the game.

Joe West thinks you do!

Or a robot crowd? Or a robot watching the game at a robot bar? Or a robot talking about the good old days of human umpires in the comment section of a tech blog for robots?

This sounds like a scene from Futurama.

Right. The same goes for other sports. I'm sure one could build a machine that would bowl strikes all day long, and if bowling were part of an industrial manufacturing process, that would be awesome. But it isn't... bowling is a sport. The whole point of sports is the challenge. No challenge, no sport.

Except nobody plays or watches sports for the refs. They are a necessity because that’s been the only possible way to enforce rules.

I play a sport at a pretty competitive level and would love it if we didn’t have a human ref. Refs can be assholes and they make bad calls all the time. It can really ruin a game. Having a machine make the calls removes a lot of the bias (and genuine mistakes) in those calls.

Formula 1 racing has lots and lots of wild, random things happening that totally change who wins vs who "deserves" to win. For example, a rookie driver might pop a tire and take out the race leader. These things happen all the time, and make the game more interesting rather than a completely predictable sure thing.

That has nothing to do with what is being talked about or is there, in F1, some commit which decides whose tire will pop today?

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