How AI is changing gymnastics judging | Hacker News Reader

How AI is changing gymnastics judging

technologyreview.com

111 pointsmjwhansen157 comments

It's not just the je ne sais quoi performance aspect that I'd be concerned about, it's something I'd call Wii-Sports-ification: the first time you try out movement-controlled games like they made the Wii console popular, you'll likely put a lot of effort into the movements as if you were wielding a real tennis racket or a golf club. After a while, you realize that the motion sensor is much more coarse, and you do much more efficient, bastardized versions of the original movements. While I acknowledge that this system is supposed to be much more sensitive, I'd expect a similar effect to be happening once athletes get their hands on those machines in training: they'll figure out how to best trigger the detection of each move, and how much flexing of the toes, bending in the back and overall effort is just enough for the machine, and it's going to change the look and feel of the sport.

To summarize, before they were doing stuff that a human judge will notice.

After, they will do stuff that the "AI" will notice.

Goes for any physical sport that needs human judges instead of something measurable, like running speed, for their competitions.

Pretty sure if you do competitional martial arts you train a subset of techniques that will be very visible and score you points as well.

Yeah but the judges are human and are typically different humans at each event with different opinions and abilities to notice subtlties. There is no one standard human judge to abuse but with AI there is a single standard.

I wonder if having some intrinsic randomness to the AI model would help to mitigate this problem? So that each AI has a subtly different perception of the move, and in order to satisfy every possible judge, the gymnast would need to complete the move as comprehensively as possible.

> I wonder if having some intrinsic randomness to the AI model would help to mitigate this problem?

This would result in identical performances resulting in different scores with the difference being artificially arbitrary.

Which for two identical performances - an impossibility - would be an issue, but for two different performances would still yield different scores.

So just like human judges?

Sure, you can reduce all of humanity to a random number generator, if you want

Maybe a slightly more generous take isn't that humans are random, but their value systems have some sort of distribution. I'm unfamiliar with gymnastics scoring, but judges may have different perspectives on what matters most if you take a sport like boxing that applies subjective scoring. One judge may value footwork and the jab more, while another weights power punches more, while another is swayed by seeing a competitor who is bloodier by the end of the fight despite having a more technically proficient fight.

I was thinking you’d be consistent within a competition, but different between competitions, so Ana, Betty and Carola face the same judges when competing in the olympics final, but their performance cannot directly be compared to Diana, Edith and Frida who completed at the world gymnastics championship.

The "AI" already hallucinates doesn't it?

Exactly. Right now, the best an athlete can do is to just give it their all, and I guess for a lot of people that would be what gymnastics is about. The potential for optimization with such machines is just on another level. You can re-run others' routines to see how you'd have scored, you can do thousands of reps to test the limits of the algorithm, you can code ragdoll simulators to find pockets of optimization,... Gymnasts will be discussing software glitches, version differences, how to 'break the algorithm'. Not even saying that's a bad thing, maybe it'll do for gymnastics what AI did for chess, open it up to a wider audience. Just saying that it could lead to a very different gymnastics scene, that will maybe look a bit more like eg the speed running communities for video games.

It's not like chess. Chess has clear, simple, inhuman rules. Gymnastics doesn't.

Just an example of a sport that got quite reshaped by AI, but not necessarily in a bad way. The differences between the sports could hardly be greater, and the way they'd be impacted by computers would also likely be quite different.

Apparently Go has also been reshaped:

Humans have improved at Go since AIs became best in the world

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2364137-humans-have-imp...

Would be cool to see that how well you are doing bar on chess.com (on the left) continuously change during a gymnastics routine.

I don‘t know. In some gymnastics people land cleanly by absorbing the shock with their kneews, instead of naturally bending them, for aesthetic reasons. I guess it depends on what we exactly mean by inhuman.

Gymnastics, Olympics, is meant to be a celebration of the human body and spirit. The micro-optimizations ruin it, because they break the alignment between casual participants and the best.

Regular people exercising should be inspired and uplifted by the elites, but it doesn't work when they're playing a different game entirely at the top.

So is chess tbh. Even excluding computer chess. You can play it by ear at an amateur level, but if you want to compete you have to memorize those openings. Which sucks all the joy out of the game.

Maybe everything has an amateur level that's just hard enough to be challenging, but still easy enough to be played primarily by ear.

Maybe that's most people's careers.

U really gonna call me out like that in front of all these people

Is it established that an AI judge would judge everyone the same? That it would be impartial?

This is a concern I also have. Perhaps the AI underfits/overfits and then an unusually-sized athlete comes along and the AI judges very poorly.

As usual, more proper (and entirely valid) concern is whether it would be biased less/in ways we prefer compared to humans.

>There is no one standard human judge to abuse but with AI there is a single standard.

Having one and only one judging standard is a good thing.

Imagine we create an ai box and say that the box decides the results. It has been trained to judge those gymnastic acrobatics and is decision is final.

What will inevitably happen is a guy will come to the competition with a weird pattern on his t-shirt and get a perfect score without preforming any of the exercise.

The competitors also choose their judges, in aggregate. This is a bad idea to change.

A totally different but related example is pitch framing in baseball.

Basically catchers will try to catch a pitch using a motion that slightly tricks the umpires eyes into calling a marginal ball a strike.

It does have a statistically significant effect and since it has become widespread catchers are judged on how good they are at pitch framing since that is a small but significant part of the value to help the team win.

That whole concept goes out the window if MLB ever changes to just using cameras to call balls and strikes!

Exactly, its basically a variation of Goodhart's Law - “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Not really. It depends on the quality of the measure and any underlying assumptions. If the target is knowing who is the fastest then a simple stopwatch (measure) is 100% aligned with the target. So the measure becoming the target is completely fine.

The problem comes when one (or multiple) measure(s) are an approximation of some ideal measure for the target. For example the famous example [1] of the measuring rat tails to determine killed rats (target). The faulty assumption here was that the only way to hand in a rat's tail is by killing them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre

Unfortunately not true. It is not a single metric.

we have extra rules on top: No doping, separation of genders,...

> Not really. It depends on the quality of the measure and any underlying assumptions. If the target is knowing who is the fastest then a simple stopwatch (measure) is 100% aligned with the target. So the measure becoming the target is completely fine.

I get your point but with this case the measure is the target, so at no point does the "measurement become the target", it's aligned from the start. But then again, this is only true if your measure is of people performing the task you actually care about. If you want to know the fastest person and you measure over 100m you may end up with Bolt, which is great if you need "the fastest over 100m in a sprinting setup" but not if you need the fastest over a full marathon.

In general, it's an extremely good first approximation - many measures result in poor targets, and care needs to be taken when turning a measure into a target. Even then it usually becomes a worse measure.

> The faulty assumption here was that the only way to hand in a rat's tail is by killing them.

More than that, it's an assumption that an increase in rat tails equals a decrease in live rats. Even if you kill a rat to get a rat tail, that doesn't necessarily hold true. It rewards those that breed 5 rats, release 4 and hand in the tail of 1. Killed rats would have still been a bad target. The true target was fewer live rats. Dead rats can be a reasonable measure, but as a target it has very risky outcomes.

>Not really. It depends on the quality of the measure and any underlying assumptions. If the target is knowing who is the fastest then a simple stopwatch (measure) is 100% aligned with the target. So the measure becoming the target is completely fine.

I am thinking of how runners all lean forward just before the finish line. This must slow their overall speed but gets a part of their body to the measurement datum slightly quicker.

I admit its not a huge deviation between the measurement and the target but still it is an attempt to affect the measurement by means other than running fastest

I shouldn't be surprised given what website I'm on, but it's crazy that people will litigate the finer points of replacing human judgement of human arts rather than reject the premise outright.

Yes precisely. For reference my most AI/LLM pilled friends are also Desktop Linux enthusiasts, for whatever that's worth..

Why is this crazy? Should we toss the entire field of science and go back to judging reality based on our feeling and perceptions?

Gymnastics is not a science. Judging "good" sports is purely an aesthetic choice.

There is a science to gymnastics. However the judging is only minimally based on the science and mostly subjective.

If something is wrong, there should be an articulable reason Find it.

That gets you people doing weird tricks to game the starting block and the finish line, which are artificial distractions from "fast running".

Only accepting entire rat bodies wouldn't necessarily work either; see the "cobra effect" that supposedly happened in colonial India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

There's a target of 9.8 seconds (or whatever) for the 100m sprint, there's a bunch of rules around things like windspeed, but it's still a good measure to find the "fastest man alive" despite being a target.

I think you mean “best shoe”

You could wear the best most advanced shoes, and I bet you still couldn’t beat Usain Bolt wearing $10 sneakers.

Two years post-retirement, wearing sweatpants and sneakers, he (albeit unofficially) tied the fastest 40-yard dash time at the NFL Combine: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2818947-watch-usain-bolt...

Isn't the measure already the target?

Another suitable maxim here is "We shape our tools and then our tools shape us"

I'd be concerned about, it's something I'd call Wii-Sports-ification

AI might be able to radically change sports like fencing and HEMA. I could see the development of match judging AIs trained by experts. Anyone who has fenced knows the frustration of the fallibility of human judges.

It's also possible that AI judging could benefit martial arts, bringing them closer to their practical roots, by counteracting the rule-gaming competition rules. ("Sport-ification" of martial arts.) Instead of allowing just any touch to count as a point, only hits with enough body structure to allow damaging force could be allowed.

Many HEMA competitions try to implement this, but expert calibrated judging AIs would make this an order of magnitude better.

I was going to mention fencing. Thats a sport where there's a massive amount of judgment required from refs which is fairly opaque to non-specialists.

as a former gymnast, I'm going to say I find this concern super unlikely

they'll figure out how to best trigger the detection of each move, and how much flexing of the toes, bending in the back and overall effort is just enough for the machine, and it's going to change the look and feel of the sport.

I remember watching Olympic diving years ago and the commentator was making a big deal out of the fact that the divers were spreading their knees apart (apparently a flaw) but that the judges weren't picking it up because their viewing angle on the dives didn't allow them to see it. So the divers were taking advantage of a literal blindspot in the human judging to make their dives easier to perform.

So really, changing to AI judging is just going to change what the competitors optimize for in an arbitrary way. It's not going to fundamentally change things.

If anything, having computers do the judging with cameras setup from all directions with human judges available to override in particularly suspect rulings is more fair to everyone and everything involved: The players, the spectators, the judges, and the game.

It will take away most of the fun(?) of arguing a judge's ruling and gaming them, but I will fundamentally always support making games fairer and objective'er.

Right, we’re heading to a world where everything is “perfect”.

> more fair to everyone and everything involved

I hope so. But I suspect a racial bias of some kind will be uncovered.

At least with an AI-based system, it's presumably consistent across performances & devices and can be used during training. While not "objective" per se, it's certainly better than an human judge that is none of these things.

The concept of judging has always included some form of bias. There is no such thing as an impartial judge. AI won't change this, it will just include a different set of biases. I'd rather be judged by a human than a machine.

>it will just include a different set of biases

One that many people who would admit the possibility in a human judge will likely insist cannot be present.

> Consistent across performances and devices

LOL! I think the assumption that an ML system would be robust across these contexts is not well founded. Things as innocuous as the lighting, background, or placement of athletic tape could easily wreck a model like this.

The thing about human judges is that the modes of failure are pretty well known at this point; and human perception and visual processing is pretty robust to perturbation.

The people that play Wii sports are not the same people that play professional sports. While I agree AI will be used to optimize routines, I highly doubt it will digress to the "I can play Wii tennis while laying down and only flicking my wrist" level. Nor do I think the "AI" sensors being used are as crude as a cheap, consumer focused Wii remote released over 15 years ago.

> The people that play Wii sports are not the same people that play professional sports.

Right, professional athletes will go to much greater lengths to exploit a scoring sytem if they can get an edge from it. The AI sensors might be much better than a Wii, but that won't fix the core problem because they will be studied and gamed much more diligently.

I, for one, would quite like to see what sort of bizarre adversarial flailing technically counts as a perfect performance. If we can get one totally surreal Olympics out of it, I'd call it a win.

Watch Olympic Sabre fencing. There's all kinds of wild flailing that people do in that sport. All that really counts is that the hit registers. So bunny hopping towards your opponent flailing that sabre wildly is a perfectly valid tactic.

There is a deeper and largely overlooked problem with sports judging, especially in the sports with artistic component (like gymnastics or figure skating) – Goodhart's effects. Goodhart's effect stands for "when the metric becomes a target it stops being a good metric". As soon as you make measurement part of the reward system, it changes the whole system.

Take figure skating as an example. Since 2006, ISU has introduced a similar judging system - IJS – that uses points for elements and an increasingly complex code of rules on how to assign those points. Each element has a so-called "base value" and judges determine GOE value in the range from -5 to +5 for each element. The computer averages that and takes trimmed mean to produce the final points for the element.

Those base values and points are logically assigned by the complexity of elements. More complex elements cost more. Great skaters can perform more complex elements. Sounds logical, right?

What has happened, though, is that using these points as a target has changed the way how skaters train. Why spend time learning "easy" elements that give little points? All time must be spent now learning "complex" elements that give more points. In a way, before, IJS skaters were chasing overall greatness; now, they chase points.

"Skater's greatness" – whatever that means – is hard to define, let alone measure. The ability to perform complex jumps was a consequence of it, not a cause. Using points as a metric changes the whole system of training, and a new generation of skaters can perform insane quads (often because of pre-puberty body sizes, though), but no one would call them great skaters.

I'm not even starting with how these points affected artistry. "Program components" (PCS) that should measure artistry are practically a joke now. You basically can multiply jump scores by some constant and get PCS. [1] All skating programs look the same now and are very predictable because of points maximization.

Back to AI. The rules for figure skating become more and more complex each year in order to duct-tape the constantly emerging issues. Many judges admit that complexity is so high that the human brain can't even possibly apply them in real time and has to resort to cognitive shortcuts. There are some early flirtations with using AI for judging figure skating [2], but nothing serious yet.

As outlined in the "Categorized Variants of Goodhart's Law" [3], one of the major reasons of this effect in sports is not just the fact that elements != greatness, but the fact that there is no shared definition of what is a True Goal of this sport. What exactly judging system try to measure? What would constitute the best skater?

Where there is no explicitly stated True Goal, any proxy variable used as metrics (like "ability to perform complex elements") will be far from good and will be distorting the system even further.

Eventually, this boils down to the structure and decision-making in the international federation that governs this sport.

And these things cannot be solved by AI. In a way, using AI is a yak-shaving for ever-increasing rules of an inherently wrong judging system.

[1] http://libjournals.unca.edu/OJS/index.php/mas/article/view/2...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq_mv1eyZyA

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585

Thank you, great comment!

> In a way, before IJS skaters were chasing overall greatness, now they chase points.

I've watched a figure skating routine recently for the first time in almost 20 years (I think the last show that I had followed was the 2006 Winter Olympics) and I was surprised to see how technical it had all become, how routine, there's no "artistry" left. It didn't use to be like this.

Similar thing happened with the NBA, now everyone chases the 3-point shoots and in so doing whatever it is that had made the NBA one of the best sports shows in the world is losing its shine. In this day and age Jordan would be seen just as a gimmicky player.

> I was surprised to see how technical it had all become, how routine, there's no "artistry" left. It didn't use to be like this.

That’s happening to, like, all of life, across the world. Beancounters have conquered the planet

One 'solution' for this might be just to let viewers judge. Have some kind of live voting system, and then this might change skating incentives to align closer with the aesthetic preferences of the actual audience.

And then 3000 Japanese fans outvote everyone else :)

I’m looking into Eurovision judging as a curious example (half votes come from public and half from judges) :)

People will buy sim cards or accounts and automate spam voting.

Viewers are not impartial. Viewer voting would mean the winning team just becomes whoever has the most fans watching.

That strategy is not without flaws either: once you let the public decide you create a system where the incentive is not "who skates better?" but rather "who can play the audience better?". The EuroVision Song Contest, for instance, has a well-known issue where the public often votes for/against a singer not because of their song but rather because of geopolitics [1]. And that's before we discuss organized voting rings.

A related but less clear point is whether it's fair for the skater to be judged by people who have no idea about skating. If my code were to be negatively judged because (say) the person in charge judges the amount of comments rather than their content, I would probably be unhappy about that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurovision_Song_Contest#Politi...

Voting? That will never do!

The original article already mentions 'leotard bias' as the problem that athletes from smaller countries face some prejudice in judging compared to the ones representing a superpower, and letting viewers judge would amplify that problem much more - it wouldn't even be about what show/PR the athlete puts on to the audience but highly influenced by global politics and what their country's leadership does.

> Similar thing happened with the NBA, now everyone chases the 3-point shoots and in so doing whatever it is that had made the NBA one of the best sports shows in the world is losing its shine. In this day and age Jordan would be seen just as a gimmicky player.

No part of this is true or even really makes sense.

A guy like Curry is definitely quite true. He wouldn’t have been a star back in the early ‘90s, a good player, maybe, but never a star.

I am trying to see where you are coming from with this comment.

Are you saying that Curry wouldn't have been a star due to how they played in the 90s? Or are you saying that Curry wouldn't have been a star because 90's players are much better?

If it's the latter, I 100% disagree with this.

The 90's definitely did not focus on 3-point shooting like there is today, but Curry has so much more going for him aside from his 3-point shot.

I very much do not like the Warriors, and I'm quick to call out that the whistle is in his favor during the regular season (especially with moving screens) - but even I can recognize his skill. Additionally, refs enforce rules much more during the playoffs, and he's still won rings.

Curry's off ball movement is phenomenal. Numerous players have talked about how hard it is to guard Curry because he has so much stamina. Additionally, he's in his 30s now and has had some of his best seasons for his career.

If you're saying that the play style of the 90s would have held him back - I agree with that. I like the NBAs current style of fluid, "positionless" play over the 90s more rigid adherence to roles. The current NBA of today lets so many more players shine, especially dynamic bigs.

Kareem has talked about this as well when watching Giannis play. I can't find the quote, so this is a paraphrase - but he was remarking how back in his day if you were tall you had to play center, and you were never allowed to practice other skills.

Today's game, you have people like Jokic - a dynamic big who can facilitate, defend, AND shoot 3s. I love to see it.

I 100% agree. The dominance of 3-point shooting has stretched the floor, causing offense to be much more dynamic.

Jimmy Highroller [0], has a very good video on this where he shows that 2-point shots have become much more valuable now due to 3-pointers.

To be part of a starting 5 you typically have to have the capability to shoot 3s - putting defenders in a difficult spot. You could guard the floor to prevent a 2, but that opens you up for a 3. Most people defend for a 3, so many people now are going in for a 2.

I do think in the current NBA we took too much away from defenders. Most of that could be fixed with refs enforcing rules against foul baiting, allowing defenders to be more physical, etc. Refs actually do this during the playoffs, I think they should do it for the entire season. There are some good rules changes I've seen as well, like 6 in the key instead of 3. There's a good video from Rusty Buckets that goes over this [1].

I don't want to get rid of the X second in the key rule, because then teams would just have bigs sit in the paint. I think that would make everyone focus on 3-pointers even more.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@JxmyHighroller/videos [1]: https://youtu.be/2E0kHY0vMQY?si=3EA3UqSGKdThF3bK

I mentioned this in other comments in the thread, but I agree with you a tiny bit in regards to offense - this video goes over it quite well by Rusty Buckets [0]. I also go over how 3-point shots have made 2-point shots more valuable.

I very much disagree with your Jordan comment. I think MJ could develop a 3-point shot. If anything, I think he could have shined even more in this day and age .

Today's NBA is more dynamic and "positionless" than previous rigid coaching, giving rise to players that would have otherwise been forced to play a role. Jokic & MJ, Haliburton & MJ, or even Sengun & MJ would be scary.

All amazing passers that could feed the ball to MJ, but also put the offense in a bad spot. If you guard MJ, then Jokic, Haliburton, Sengun, etc. could all shoot a 3 if left wide open.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E0kHY0vMQY

Very nice explanation of situation, but I think we could go even further.

You agree that "Skater's greatness – whatever that means – is hard to define", but I would say that the problem is then the idea of competition for this sport and not "how you judge" / "how you measure".

There is no inherent need of competition for every sport in my opinion. There can be prizes, juries, etc, but if people would accept that in the end it is subjective might make it easier than overly complex system to rate "fairly" something unclear (doubt anybody would want to put rules on how you rate a film for an Oscar - they just know it is "fuzzy").

Absolutely. Competition is just an incentive structure for athletes. Even the word "competition" stems from the Latin words "com" and "petere" and means "strive with". Not "strive against". Strive with. We just need other humans to challenge us when we're don't feel challenged enough or intrinsic motivation doesn't justify the time/effort being spent.

So, again, the goal of the competition is to incentivize athletes to show their best. Accidentally, we need some way of comparing results here, and that's where the judging system comes into play. It has (or rather should have) a nice bonus of giving feedback to the athletes on what to improve upon.

Unfortunately, the majority of people in sports equate sports with competitions. Even some definitions of sports contain clauses like "...in a competitive fashion...". They strongly believe that without competition, there is no sports component.

Yet, every four years, the world rediscovers a unique Norwegian sports policy for children. [1][2] They banned competitions for kids till the age of 11 in the late 1970s. You can have competitions, technically, but you are prohibited from ranking kids and publishing results with rankings. That, of course, is based on the studies of the reasons behind drop-out from sports rates and the science of motivation (self-determination theory, mainly). As a result, Norway has 1st rank in medals in the Winter Olympics and 9th in both summer and winter (they even won gold in beach volleyball!) and the highest sports participation rates in the world (9 out of 10 kids and 7 out of 10 adults, I believe). Sports != competitions indeed.

Another example I like is Magnus Carlsen refusing to participate in the Worlds Chess Championships for the 11th time because it simply doesn't challenge him anymore. [3] Again, competitions are not about "finding who's the best" (that's a byproduct). It's about challenging to show an athlete's best. In the case of Magnus it failed to achieve this goal.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/kidspost/2022/03/03/norway-is...

[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/olympics/article-norw...

[3] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11034789/Magnus-Car...

Great point on competition in schools. The competitive focus of sports in schools rewards those that are already athletically gifted while shaming and discouraging the mediocre.

That's great if the purpose of PE is to create elite athletes. If the point is to encourage a healthier population by instilling an appreciation for sport and physical activity in kids it's an abject failure. Kids that are already good at sports love PE, while less gifted kids develop a disdain for sport and by adulthood have often dropped all sports and exercise.

Yes, and it's not just in schools.

Drawing from SDT (self-determination theory), one of the main predictors for motivation is a psychological need called 'competence' (perception of whether your actions lead to the feeling of growth or accomplishment). Different actions and situations can send either a positive competence signal to a person (and increase motivation) or a negative one (and decrease motivation). These things are measurable.

The main issue with competitions is that they send positive competence signal to one person (winner) and negative to everyone else. Like you trained for months, and now you've lost. This leads to increased dropout rates in sports, which are especially pronounced in kids. Norwegians asked the question – instead of spending money and effort to try to engage people and kids in sports, maybe we should ask a question, 'Why do they drop out in the first place' and prevent those? Competitions came as one of the strongest predictors of dropping out of sports, hence the policy.

Depends on the competition format a bit. You can also have rankings and while they are not ideal either, probably it will not be as bad as "send positive competence signal to one person (winner)". For example if you do a single elimination tournament of course people eliminated in first round will get bored and not interested (you can't even make a proper ranking)

Focusing on winners only is a societal choice though. I have met people (in countries were a lot of people like doing sport) that were practicing a sport and joining competitions for years even though they were not very competent in that sport - because it was their hobby and they just enjoyed being there.

Yes, and we're talking about statistically measurable things. There is plenty of room to experiment with different reward systems in competitions. For example, in Finland, there is an alternative figure skating judging system for kids' competitions, and they have medals (1,2, and 3 place), but everyone else is the rest. Thus they send a positive competence signal to the winner and a relatively weak negative competence signal to others (i.e. no one is labeled "worst", plus everyone gets some prize reward).

Tennis' Play&Stay program for kids under 10 years old is also a good example – they use different tournament structures, so no one feels like they lost.

This has not been my experience in sports, not even remotely so. I was never once shamed for the sports I sucked at. Quite the opposite my teammates were always there to try to help me out and help me generally improve, even when I was playing shamefully poorly. There is a huge amount of bonding in sports, team and individuals, because you all go through the training together, losses together, and of course also the wins. School sports also have generally divisions: typically varsity, junior varsity, and then intramural. There's something for everybody.

If anything, the hardest part about sports is that you have to be the sort of person who can try their hardest, compete, lose and then use that as motivation to further improve yourself. Do you know how it feels to give something your all, and then fail - all in front of hundreds of people counting on you? And then come back from that? It's not easy. Behind any champion you're going to see a lot of pain and loss that they had to overcome. It's not like you're born a champ and everything is just easy. People of course are not equal, but the struggle is something we all deal with, and sports really helps with that.

It's awesome that you have this experience.

So, to be clear, competition – with rewards, prizes, and medals – is a form of extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is often very powerful (gun at your head – also an extrinsic motivator – will motivate you to do what's asked). The problem, though, is that it's short-lived.

So if you were a sports minister who tries to maximize people's involvement in sports (at all ages), you would prefer to have more intrinsic motivation to sports, rather then extrinsic.

I would, of course, completely agree that intrinsic motivation > all. But I think you're also arguing something quite a bit different here than you were earlier. Rankings, in particular, are extremely important. They provide you a reasonably objective measure of seeing yourself improve, and they also help you determine who is a proper opponent for yourself.

In chess, for instance, a 200 point rating difference usually gives the stronger player an expectation of about 3:1. And ratings range from about 500 to just under 2900. So those ratings are absolutely critical in order to find an opponent at your skill level. In sport the exact same thing is true, with similarly wide scales of ability. I think the humility that rankings force upon one is also a very important part of sport and improvement.

So for instance about the Norway anecdote you gave (related to the prohibition on youth rankings from the 70s onward), Norway was always absolutely god tier at the winter Olympics, long before the 70s. In the 6 Olympic games from 1924-1952 they came in overall #1 5 times, and #2 once. In the 12 games since 1980, they've only came in overall #1 3 times. [1] Their total number of medals has increased, like everybody's, because many more events, and occasionally even new sports, have been added to the Olympics over time. I would not read much into this one way or the other, beyond pointing out that it's not a particularly relevant anecdote.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway_at_the_Olympics

Great comment. I see you use rankings and ratings as synonyms, but there's a crucial difference here. Knowing that your level is 500 or 1200 (rating) is useful feedback for seeing yourself improve. Knowing that you're on the 10th place and someone else on the 1st (ranking) is much less useful.

The Nordic sports model is specifically against rankings for kids. It's fine to give them detailed scores or ratings or evaluations that help them improve. It's not fine to order their results and put them on a list of winners and losers.

Generally, sports feedback (and also goals) should be centered on things that you can control (like technique). Ranking – the place you earned in a competition or a tournament – is outside of your control, as it depends on the performance of others (and also on the quality of the judging and judging systems). Rankings are based on comparison and have a number of issues – take Uber ranking inflation, for example.

If your kid scored 3rd place in a competition – what does it tell you exactly about her/his technique or quality of coaching? Pretty much nothing. Only the fact that 2 other kids scored higher. Unfortunately, it's not rare in sports to see how the general national level of coaching in some sports goes down, while everyone still have their ranking and medals.

Using (measurable) ratings and scores as feedback also needs to be taken with a dose of caution. These systems are developed by humans, they're imperfect and usually measure only what is measurable. Sometimes, they're even wrong. Back to the IJS example – the system that was designed for Olympic-level athletes – it is often used for kids' competitions. For the lack of other options, judges enter entry-level elements into the system and assign base values. Instead of "quad lutz" it's a "shooting duck" entry-level exercise and assigns points to it. Then, judges pretend that they can "measure" this child's exercise – was it 0.4 points or 0.5? Needless to say, there is no actual measurement of "shooting duck" – it's just when all you have is a hammer, everything seems like a nail. Then, the parents fight over whose kid is judged more harshly. So, these systems can be pretty flawed.

And yes, of course, I don't attribute the Norway Olympics' success to the lack of competitions till the age of 11. Rather I'm showing that the policy of late specialization and withholding competition till kids mature a bit is not against the goals of high-performance sports.

I think our differences in perspective probably just comes from different backgrounds. My sports background is in wrestling, and there's extremely minimal ambiguity in scoring there. I think I can empathize with you on these issues in sports like figure skating where scoring may be "objective", but complex enough that it starts to become subjective again - perhaps like boxing in some ways.

And in general I am very much a fan of avoiding excessive extrinsic motivation. For instance I loathe, with a passion, participation trophies. Because I do agree that this results in people participating only for those trophies rather than for the sake of the sport. But where we may differ, perhaps, is that I do very much think that excellence should be rewarded and recognized. Not even just for the sake of those victors, but as a model for other people to strive for. And, in any case, if somebody is good enough at basically anything to be #1 in it, they're already going to be driven intrinsically, or have crazy parents... but that's another topic!

I think you are right. While I'm interested in sports governance/economics/history as a whole, I'm mainly dealing with figure skating, so biased towards the problems of this sport. Boxing rankings are fun, by the way. As far as I understand none of the four (!) sanctioning bodies in boxing have implemented anything resembling a mathematical model for rankings.

Re: extrinsic motivation. SDT (Self-Determination Theory) actually has quite a lot of studies on this matter. See Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) as an example [1] If you're designing reward/incentive system and want to maximize intrinsic motivation, what to choose – reward for showing up, reward for doing a task, reward for doing great or reward for winning?

Here is a quick breakdown of these contingencies:

1. Task-noncontingent – Reward is given simply for being present and does not specifically require actually being engaged with the target activity.

2. Engagement-contingent – Reward is given for spending time being engaged with the target activity.

3. Completion-contingent – Reward is given for completing a target activity (sometimes within a time limit).

4. Task-contingent – Refers to a larger category containing both engagement-contingent and completion-contingent rewards.

5. Performance-contingent – Reward is given for reaching a specific performance standard, for example, doing better than 80% of other people who have done it.

6. Competitively contingent – Reward is given to the winner of a competition and the loser gets lesser or no rewards.

Simplifying a bit, the results are – the further you go from 1 to 6, the stronger the detrimental effect on intrinsic motivation. In 6, for example, intrinsic motivation can be sustained only for the winners (because it carries a strong positive competence signal) but undermines it for everyone else.

Note that it's not always bad. In a private company, you may want to get rid of "underperformers", so rewarding excellence works fine.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10589297/

I think this is quite strongly rebuked by nearly all of history. Things like participation trophies are quite a modern invention, at least in anything like the scale they have now. In the past it's not like there was some dramatically reduced desire to compete, if anything it may have been much higher.

Anecdotally I'm sure you can also rebuke such, as can I. In sports and games I did do well in, I obviously did not start out amazingly, nor did I receive any accolades or such for merely existing. Yet I went on to thrive in a number of sports/games, in no small part because I wanted to reach the top.

And the same is true of endless household names. E.g. Michael Jordan is quite famous for having been a bench warmer until he hit a growth (and competence) spurt, which started to transform him into the beast he would become. It's not like he just quit when he was relatively weak.

The incidents of competitors which started and stayed at the top, through ever more stringent competition, are very much the exception, and not the rule. Yet if your above hypothesis was correct - they're pretty much all we'd see!

Well, it's not my hypothesis at all :) The link I posted is a review of the literature on the topic.

I think the real problem with "participation trophies" is that it has very low competence signal. Not negative. But very low for everybody, regardless of performance. The winner's prize, at the same time, gives an extremely positive competence signal to the winner (at the expense of the negative signal to everybody else).

Again, if you put yourself into the shoes of a designer of an incentive structure, then you are facing a trade-off here. Do you want more people to keep doing this activity, or do you want to single out top performers? In sports, I believe it's more of a cultural element. Scandinavian countries, for example, are notorious for their culture of not expressing their personal success (Janteloven). That fits well with the Nordic sports model. More individualistic countries or post-soviet countries with "win at all costs" sports ideology tend to favor incentive structures optimized for early top performers.

With due respect you're begging the question here. The hypothesis you linked to is just that - a hypothesis. And it simply fails when looking at the past where there was both high sports participation, no such thing as participation trophies (again generally speaking - I'm sure some event some where had them, but they were not even remotely normalized), and winners were recognized. It also fails to explain why athletes often come from backgrounds of struggle. Or why athletes when faced with stronger competition (such as moving from JV to varsity, high school to college, etc.) don't just suddenly give up, and so forth, and so on.

Ultimately I strongly disagree that participation trophies incentivize participation, as well as that merit trophies discourage it. It is plainly illogical. I'm certain I could dig through the study and find a way that their methodology could easily lead to false conclusions, but I'm not terribly interesting in doing so, and in any case such a thing would be highly unlikely to be persuasive anyhow - because we aren't arguing that study, but our own personal biases. And, like with just about everything, there's extensive evidence for whatever side you want to argue.

I don't see any contradiction here. Merit trophies do increase motivation, but only for small subset of people, and decrease for the rest. It's also important to note that we're talking about statistical nature of things here. Competition sends negative competence signal to majority of participants, but it's not the only competence signal – parents, coaching and even culture in club also play a role.

Same goes for other key needs in SDT – autonomy being most important. Here is a study of swimmers and their drop-out after 10 and 22 months after assessing their coaching styles (autonomous vs controlled). [1]

Competition prizes are also form of extrinsic motivation ("external regulation" to be specific). Extrinsic motivation can be (and often is) very powerful. It just don't last.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225153306_Associati...

I would rather we speak humanly, rather than in the intentional obfuscation of language that's ubiquitous in social science to make simple concepts, which are often little more than a researcher's personal biases wrapped in obfuscation, sound 'sciency.' Einstein's paper on special relativity is a zillion times more readable than that 'thing' you linked to which is nothing more than a little survey!

Back to speaking like humans, the thing you are not responding to is expectations vs reality. Participation trophies are near ubiquitous in places like the US, and there's an ongoing attack on merit across a wide array of domains - let alone efforts to recognize and reward it. Were this having the effects you claim, would you not expect to see absolutely skyrocketing sports participation? In reality it's down, in many areas sharply so.

That's interesting. For me that paper is more than readable – probably because I know all the terms, as I studied SDT extensively. But I can understand how terms like "introjected" can sound alien.

Before replying to expectations vs reality, we need to establish and agree on facts. Are you saying that in US, across all states and all sports, competition prizes has been replaced by participation trophies and you see a negative trends in sports participation?

It's "readable" in the most technical sense of the word, but it's exceptionally obfuscated and needlessly convoluted. Whatever that paper is trying to say could be succinctly and clearly expressed in a page or two, at most. But it wouldn't look as what the authors perceive to be "sciency", because behind the grandiloquent language is invariably a pretty simple premise and experimentation (or a survey in this case) invariably designed to confirm biases, rather than challenge them. It's ubiquitous in the social sciences (see: Sokal experiment) and only going to get much worse with the advent of LLMs that will enable streamlined obfuscation.

And no I'm (obviously?) not speaking of every single instance, as for a topic like this there will always be some exception or another. I am saying that as an aggregate - sports participation is down, and participation trophies are up.

I laughed out loud the first time I heard the band name "Gym Class Heroes" because I instantly identified with part of what you said in terms of some kids hating gym class.

On the other hand, I think that there are kids who are coordinated/sporty/physically talented and just as we celebrate and nurture the academic talents of academically talented kids, I think it's good to celebrate and nurture the talents of physically talented kids. Not everyone is going to excel at academics and if we steer schools to only encourage excellence in certain areas, I think we risk discouraging those who excel in other areas from feeling good about themselves.

I don't even think it's a good strategy for creating elite athletes. Can we really determine someone's "elite potential" by how good they are as a young kid? If one kid has parents who took them skating a couple of times and the other didn't, the first one is going to absolutely destroy the second in a competition, but does that really tell us anything about how they will perform, 10 years down the line at the olympics? Yet we filter out anyone who doesn't conform to this standard.

True. Traditional (and still popular) beliefs that sports talents can be identified early are questioned a lot within the sports science community. [1] Canada has implemented a scientifically-based LTD (Long-Term Development) model of sports development [2], and while it's based a bit on concepts of optimal windows of trainability (like the age where flexibility is trained best), it draws on the fact that everyone's journey in sports is unique. This non-linearity is also a basis of a modern coaching science known as the Constraint-Led Approach (CLA) [3] – it's basically a non-linear pedagogy applied to motor skill acquisition practices.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0066...

[2] https://sportforlife.ca/long-term-development/

[3] https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Constraints-B...

As a tangent on the Magnus thing, he didn't stop because it doesn't challenge him anymore. His title defenses against players of his generation have all, except his most recent, been less than convincing. 2 of them he only won in tiebreaks. In the most recent match, he was playing against an opponent known for extreme psychological instability and who had never competed in a world championship before. They played 5 great draws, then his opponent lost one razor thin (and extremely long) game and blew up. Basically, Magnus is/was well on his way to losing his championship, and I think he wanted to go out undefeated.

This is further emphasized by the fact that the one opponent he was willing to play is a brand new player on the scene who is absurdly insanely good at bullet (1 minute) chess, but has had relatively mixed results in classical (bear in mind he IS a top 10 player), is prone to psychological issues, and is very young with 0 experience at the world level. He somewhat predictably ended up scoring 0.5 points away from last place in the candidates event - and that is who Magnus wanted to "challenge" himself with, like a cat challenging himself with a particularly fast mouse.

---

Also, I was curious about the petere issue, as the Romans in particular took their competition quite competitively. Looking it up, it seems that it means many things such as attack, assail, aim at, etc. [1] But it does not seem to mean to strive, let alone with?

[1] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peto#Latin

Thank you for the insightful comment! Is there any good read on the subject?

Re: petere, it's not about Romans, rather the original meaning that provides insight into the pure form of competition. There is a great book called "True Competition" by David Shields that explores this topic and tries to answer the question "How to make competitions more healthy so they don't deteriorate into something that destroys the original spirit of competition".

It's also interesting that in English word "competition" is also used for business, economics, biology, and political sciences. In business, it's clear that competition is a tool to incentivize market players to pursue the highest quality of service at the lowest cost ("show your best"). Again, in monopoly/monopsony, there is no competition – we need other players for that – and no incentive to "show your best".

The reason I mentioned the Romans is, of course, because Latin comes from them. And so how they viewed competition is likely to be reflected in the word, as they coined it, or at least the word that would end up being used through the ages. It's actually why I bothered to look it up, because it didn't really jive with what one thinks of when you think of the Romans and competition - a militaristic empire that would host competitions, to the death, for entertainment and sport. Not entirely far removed from how even their aristocracy competed with one another. By contrast the other meanings of petere most certainly do!

On Magnus - there's a huge chess subculture, so it's hard to reference any given thing. I might start with this [1]. He's giving every single reason for why he might decline in the future, which I think terrifies him. Chess players tend to peak in their 30s and he's now 33, his peak rating was in 2014. It's quite unpleasant to imagine that you'll not only never be as strong as you once were, but that you will start to see your strength all so gradually decline, year by year.

So amongst his million preemptive excuses, you also have him somewhat rewriting history now claiming his "2 down, 5 to go" comment was "just trolling." He made that comment after his second world championship victory, which was extremely convincing - as it was against the previous generation of players. For some context, no chess world champion has ever won/defended their title more than 6 times. The most dominant champions ever, Lasker/Karpov/Kasparov all won/defended 6 times a piece. Magnus, it seems, will go down with 5.

[1] - https://www.chess.com/news/view/carlsen-on-his-future-person...

> There is no inherent need of competition for every sport in my opinion

I disagree. Competition is a defining property of ‘sport’.

What’s wrong with calling figure skating an art form? Nobody calls ballet or violin playing sports [1], but there are “prices, juries, etc” for them.

I would split various activities in a group where objective measurements are more or less possible (they never fully are) and one where they aren’t.

The first would consist of:

- games, where your opponent has significant influence on your behavior or performance (basketball, judo, billiards, etc). Basically, if you can play defensively, it’s a game.

- sports, where they don’t (archery, skiing, all forms of athletics; I would include the jumping events, even though your opponent’s performance may significantly affect your strategy. Etc.)

The second would be ‘arts’.

[1] if you look at the modern Olympics, painting and other art forms were events at some time, but that, but even then, did people call those sports?

> Competition is a defining property of ‘sport’.

This requires a reference though. For example:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/sport

does not exclude non-competition based physical activities from the definition of sport, to quote: "a game, competition, or activity needing physical effort and skill that is played or done according to rules, for enjoyment and/or as a job: ". Definitions might differ from dictionary to dictionary and language to language

Your definition of games assumes an opponent (ex: Rubik's Cube would not fit), so I think it is not ideal.

Overall I think we could just stick to existing definitions and just accept that some competitions are "subjective" (ex: gymnastics, etc.)

Formal sports like artistic gymnastics and figure skating are doomed to degenerate into rigid attempts to maximize points. That's why we have disciplines like freestyle skating, where people can be creative. Unfortunately, there's less money in that.

I assume what you see when there really isn't competition (aside from pleasing an audience such as professional figure skating demonstrations) is more emphasis on artistry and crowd-pleasing elements that look hard (OK they are) but are easier than other elements that are much more difficult but largely indistinguishable by the average viewer.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Now that figure skating has become more of a sport and less of an art discipline, I like it a lot better. I never like the artistic part of it; I feel there's a time and a place for artistic endeavors, and a sports competition is neither. Honestly the more artistic elements always appeared completely out of their place to me, more distracting from the sport than adding to it.

Skaters being rewarded for performing as difficult elements, as close to perfection as possible? I'm all for it!

Same for gymnastics.

That's perfectly fine, except something more is happening with figure skating. You see, rotating your body in the air and using your body for locomotion on the ice are two very different skills. What's happening now with figure skating is that one skills completely overshadowed another (the one that gives the word "skating" in the name of this sport). Modern skating champions can't do figures anymore (skating figures is what gives the word "figure" to this sport).

Great to see a fellow lover of the sport here on HN.

In Figure Skating, HNers should also be aware of the issues surrounding the current sport of figure skating:

1) Women's Free Skate is the marquee event in the winter Olympics. Not other event comes close in the ratings, and therefore, the ad buys.

2) Russia. Figure skating, and especially women's skating, is completely jumbled up by the interference of Russia. To sum up a very complex topic (poorly), women's figure skating currently has a strange and deep relationship with Russia's ruling elite and has had one for a few decades. That leads to many scandals and a lot of bribing of officials. It's still playing out from the 2022 Olympics. The US team still has not gotten their medals from the team event.

If you've not seen the end of the 2022 women's free skate, do yourself a favor and watch it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgiuo4lHFt4 . The meltdowns here are just so emblematic of everything that Russia is today and the travesty of the Ukraine war. The drama leading into this event and the drama coming out of it are much better than any reality TV show.

3) Declining interest. The laws of physics are not kind to figure skaters. The push for quads is only leading to the push for qunits and hexes. The effort required to advance the sport is going to be larger than time allows for training. At which point, probably sometime around the 2050 Olympics, the sport will be 'solved'. Combine this with the explosion of new sports full of frontiers to be broken, and figure skating will no longer be the marquee event. Training so intensely for such meager gains is going to be a hard sell to the boys and girls that are to be the medal winners.

Great comment, thank you.

I would just add that the russia thing is a direct consequence of the judge's system change (where russian officials are very much involved). The reason why russia was dominating medal standings for women (and not for men or ice dance), is precisely because russia could afford a stream of pre-puberty girls who win a medal at the cost of their physical and mental health.

Also, needless to say, the russian sport system is still a direct copy of the soviet sport system, which was essentially created by Stalin when USSR first decided to participate in the Olympics in 1952 (guess, why USSR didn't care about the international sport before WWII). The way how sport is organized in russia goes against the sports autonomy principle that is sacred in democratic countries and is embodied in the Olympic Charter and European Sports Charter.

For the other HNers out there not deeply into Figure Skating, the other comments here go into the 'new' scoring system very well.

One thing that I think needs stressing is that the base value score is a pretty good system; it's the Grade of Execution (GoE) score that is bad. The GoE is where all the shenanigans are hiding and where all the corruption lies. The 'new' system is a lot better than the old one, that is for sure, and it's a real improvement. But if you thought that Russia was going to let any system be implemented without the ability for them to bribe or threaten their way to a medal, you've got another thing coming. GoE scores are where that happens nowadays.

As an aside, now is the time to revamp figure skating with Russia being sidelined. I hope that such an opportunity never comes again, but now is that opportunity. The lack of push to really get the sport ready for the 21st century just speaks to the deep and embedded corruption at the international level.

I love the sport and still follow it. But my kids are not going to be participating at senior level (or whatever it's called these days) because of the futility and geopolitics.

There's also the issue that it was taking something that was supposed to just be a fun recreation, applying a score mechanic, applying competitive sport pressure, applying money rewards for certain results, and destitution for others, applying nationalism pressure, and then saying it needs to be "artistic." Except now they're mostly trying to skate "correct" for national glory and endorsements.

> Why spend time learning "easy" elements that give little points?

Is this really a result of the current points system? Even in old-school, 6.0 human judging, wouldn't it be preferable to reward a much more difficult routine with higher scores? Is there any reason not to reward, say, a triple-triple combo better scores than a similar routine which tops out at a double-double?

Well, in the 6.0 system, however subjective and imperfect, the judges assessed the overall skater's level. One judge might have preferred complex jumps, while others might be more inclined toward edge control and skating skills. And there were no clearly defined metric to measure, which makes it more subjective, but also prone to Goodhart's effects.

In a way it was similar to how classical music contests are judged. No one could claim that they can measure the performance, so they rely on the subjective and imperfect judgments of the humans who are considered experts in music. One judge might be consistently high-scoring, another might be consistently low-scoring, and they might look at the different aspects (technicality, musicality, etc.). They just try to capture their ranking (voting) distribution.

In a way, the old system was more like voting. Even if the judge can't formally explain why s/he thinks skater A has better skating skills than B, the system would capture their preference. (And of course, this comes with all sort of biases – sequential bias, national bias, etc). But an important distinction is that in this system there is no proxy variable to optimize for.

In the IJS it's very clear what to optimize for. So everyone is doing it. Also, one of the major changes, of course, was eliminating compulsory figures from competitions. Modern skaters don't even know they existed as a thing. Nowadays, everyone knows that you win a figure skating competition not by having Patrick Chan level skating, but by rotating your body in the air quickly – that is what gives points. So in modern clubs all over the world people start learning jumps in the first half of a year of practice. Which, ironically, leads to the lower probability of them actually mastering the jumps, because you still need insanely good edge control for take-offs and landings.

> there were no clearly defined metric to measure

This is fine for an artistic competition, like classical music as you mention. But figure skating is a sport, it's in the Olympics, not having stated goals seems unfair to the competitors (athletes), and I can't think of any other sport which doesn't have very specific rules describing the criteria for winning.

I feel like the obvious effect of this is that gymnastics becomes all about testing against and optimizing for an algorithm. That sounds sterile and lacking any of the romance (best word I can think of) that goes into physical competition. Then I remind myself that optimizing for the opinions of judges is the status quo. Judges that are susceptible to wild bias in all sorts of undetectable ways. This will change the sport for sure, but I can't say that I think it will be all bad.

How accurate is this? There's a video embedded in the article.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CinAYBZYANg

To me it looks very shaky, e. g. at 0:20-0:25. It seems like they're not using an underlying physical model that takes momentum into account. Also it looks like the system is interpreting the movement of the ponytail as head movement.

This is a specific issue of a general problem of AI/computer judging, where humans think they're judging on specific criteria, and write it into the computer, without ever taking a moment to ask whether that's actually what they want.

I use speeding in vehicles a lot. The point of a 55MPH speed limit isn't really that cars should be going exactly 55MPH at all times. It's an approximation of a complex situation that could handle only one number. But it's not actually a law of physics. Rigidly handing out tickets for people doing 56MPH is missing the point of speed limit. (As are many of the "You're doing X over" flashing signs, generally put in places that are precisely where the speed limit is too low and what people are doing is actually fine.)

Now that we finally have the technology to determine whether a gymnast was or was not one millimeter over some line, the question should be raised, is that what we actually want to judge on? Because just because we humans thought we were judging on that, just because we thought that's what we wanted, is it really?

It is this examination step that has been missing in every rush to insert computers into some judging system. We thoughtlessly reify accidents of history and what used to be easy to judge. At least in the case of gymnastics we're not going to send anyone to jail because of such thoughtlessness, but the sport could be destroyed. In the end, it still needs views, however abstracted the sports may seem to be from that, and after the novelty wears off, seeing humans out there competing for the most robotic and soulless performances runs the risk of gradually, but steadily, destroying all support for the sport.

Now, personally, I'm not sure this wouldn't be a net gain for humanity in this particular place. But it's certainly not what the gymastics community as a whole wants and they really need to slow down and apply some thought to what they really want before they let someone reify that into code.

They won't. Nobody else is either, for things far more important than this. But they should.

Particularly, I'd say that it would be awesome and could save sports which are graded based on such rules as the current state of affairs is pretty appalling (I hate seeing competitions which are graded based on subjective things and judge biases, for me it's the opposite -- such biases make seeing these sports maddening for me up to the point that I prefer not watching at all as I'm 100% sure it's unfair from the start).

I agree with your overall point, although there are reasons why we use hard cutoffs like that: they are objective. If somebody is traveling at 55 mph on a straight highway, on a clear warm sunny day, they can be sure[0] they aren't breaking any laws.

Everybody recognizes it's not perfect; but in reality a cop isn't going to a write a ticket for 56 in a 55 (unless they have some ulterior motive). They might write a ticket for dangerous driving at 45 if the conditions are bad enough. There's still some human element, but we try to minimize it because it creates an opportunity for corruption and inequality in enforcement of laws.

In the case of sports the judging is supposed to have a human element, but the judges are supposed to only care about the performance and routine and not stuff like the nationality of the gymnast.

Which is an unrealistic hope frankly. So pick your poison; either we take subjective human judgement and accept it will wanted and unwanted subjective elements, or we do this stuff and remove subjectivity.

[0] There's always measurement error but that's a separate issue.

I honestly feel like what AI is really doing is just clarifying what we’re actually doing. This whole article reminds me of my reaction when I first saw chatgpt write an essay.

I immediately recognized that this essay would’ve been accepted by my teacher when I was a kid, and then remembered just how useless I thought essays were back when I had to write them. It feels like, with AI, I had proof that these essays were just “busy work” rather than anything else. As a student, I was just taking the prompt that my teacher gave me and expanding it into an essay, and there was no information in the essay that wasn’t already in the prompt itself. Why is it useful to take something that could be said in a single sentence and say it in 5 pages? I wasn’t encouraged to think about the book I was writing the essay about because my thoughts were seen as secondary to doing the technical work and simply copying the style and format of the essay, but now, with AI, that part had been automated and all that education was for nothing.

It seems like Gymnastics really is, at it’s heart, a very technical act. Your goal is to achieve perfect normal angles for some reason. But as robots begin to dispel the haze around technical work, we stop being so interested in technicality. You can see it as an attack if you’re really invested in that technical stuff, but really you gotta ask yourself why you were so interested in it in the first place.

Do you not believe it to be valuable to be able to write 5 pages of coherent text? Is that not something that schools should teach users how to do?

Computer vision determining if a ball touches the line, or which body part crosses the line first seems fine. Judging artistic merits not so much. If this like 3d capturing the entire routine and analytically evaluating difficulting based on some biomechanical formula them maybe. Otherwise I'd rather biased judging be limited to people / geopolitics than whichever vendor writes the code. Or artistic elements need to weigh down / eliminated.

this is fine with me, but it shouldnt replace the existing panel, instead augment the panelists with it. It could analyze the rotations and timings much more closely and replay/study it at a more technical level.

Anyone aware of there are proposals to use computer vision for judging the technical part and the judges for the artistic part? On paper that should help fulfilling both schools of thought

>It became official in 2017, when the FIG formally announced its collaboration with Fujitsu

Does FIG have powers of prosecution like UK Postal Office? Asking for a friend.

https://archive.md/sJrYj

>(...) says FIG’s Steve Butcher, who previously served as sport director for the organization and is now the president of the element-recognition working group for Fujitsu, the company that developed the AI."

Oh boy, considering the Horizon debacle going on in the UK, I can expect a similar story in Olympic gymnastics in the near future...

great! now the gymnasts won't have to sleep w the judges, and the judges won't be subject to political pressure

I'd be more than a little worried that AI might start picking up on the wrong signals (like uniform or skin colour) to assign points.

“Gymnastics is a subjective sport, like diving or dressage, where factors like nationality, body type, the location of a judge’s chair, and vague concepts like “artistry” and “performance” affect scores.”

Even though it’s a subjectively judged event, the scores somehow have three decimal places!

There's a 200+ page Code of Points[1] that determines how much each skill is worth as well as each error. At the elite level, there's a panel of 9 judges for each event, divided into judges who tally the execution score and the difficulty score, and the reference panel that effectively audits the execution score.[2] The difficulty and execution scores are averaged. This is how you can get three-decimal scores due to averaging. Here is an example of a judge's score sheet.[2]

(Nevertheless, there are still issues with bias, where athletes or teams who benefit from a particular judge's biases might have their errors more gently scored. For example, on the bars, gymnasts are required to hit a handstand position within a 10-degree range of vertical. But a judge who is impacted by a bias, or a certain viewing position, many not notice that a particular handstand was at 15 degrees, and not deduct accordingly. This is where the AI judging may be particularly helpful.)

[1] https://www.gymnastics.sport/publicdir/rules/files/en_2022-2...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYjhFnaoF90&t=408s

[3] https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/gymnastics-101-scoring

This whole affair seems rather silly IMO. For all the hullabaloo about AI killing art, I feel like this kind of fine grained scoring does more damage to art than AI ever will.

AI is a fine grained score-card.

I am a little confused how anyone thinks AI will do better than humans at not weighting the score based on those exact factors, given what we've seen so far.

>JSS is not currently used to make determinations about artistry, and it still isn’t considered ready to use on certain complex routine components, like beam connections and dance elements on floor; the tech just isn’t there yet

So at what point does a sensor of some kind that does some computation become 'AI'? Is this just marketing buzzword bandwagoning?

A more precise term might be "computer vision," which is indeed a field of AI, but it is a less-known term even among a reasonably technical laypeople (such as might be reading a business publication like the MIT Tech Review).

> So at what point does a sensor of some kind that does some computation become 'AI'?

By going backwards in time — I'd guess sometime between 2010 and 1995.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

I sometimes joke that at some point humans cease to be considered intelligent too.

Where AI sports judging needs to happen fast is refereeing at the NBA and NFL level. Referees ruin games. Fans are turned off and always skeptical. If an AI can ref a game better, it'd be instant success for the leagues - not to mention getting rid of the unions who protect poorly performing referees.

MLB is weird because everything needed to ref a baseball game does not need any advanced AI. MLB simply refuses to let robots ref games.

Be careful what you ask for. FIFA's Video assistant referee was supposed to banish controversial decisions in soccer matches forever. Instead, they simply replaced one form of controversial decisions with another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_assistant_referee

The NBA and NFL already have their own versions of VAR, with all the complaints and problems that the football version has.

If people make mistakes watching the event for tens of seconds from multiple cameras with VAR, how could you trust the same decision made without it in a split second.

Top soccer refs get >96% of decisions right. That's enough for me. It's sport, it's not criminal justice or healthcare.

I want the split second decision. It used to be that the ball would go into the net, you'd glance over at the linesman, see his flag down by his side, the ref indicates for a goal, the fans lose their minds. It would all happen in a second or two, now we have 4 minutes of video pedantry following every goal.

This idea that soccer is a 'flowing' game with minimal stoppages is very important to fans.

It would all happen in a second or two

Ideally AI and goal line technology should solve this. If the computer knows where the ball and all the players are at all time, then checking if the ball crosses the line or if anybody was offside leading up to the goal should be instant.

There are a thousand and one subjective reasons why a goal that was given by the on-pitch ref can and have recently been disallowed after review by the video pedants.

Even offside has subjectivity, something we only discovered after we implemented video review. Could you accurately tell which pixel of shirt sleeve is an attacker's arm and which is shoulder? (Your arm can be offside because you can't legally score with it, shoulder vice versa)

We already have goal line technology for the ball crossing the line, it's totally instant, the ref has a device on his wrist which vibrates.

Even offside has subjectivity

It does today, but the whole point of the AI would be to remove that subjectivity. Offside would be whatever the AI said is offside. Not saying this would necessarily be a good thing for the game, but it would remove the slow video review process and let referees instantly call goal/no goal.

VAR is not an AI system, it's just the referee watching the video replay. It could have been done 50+ years ago.

Has to be better than this happening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5QlBHF6ib8

The prevailing opinion amongst soccer fans now is that we should go back to a single human referee on the pitch, not double down on technology.

We tried it, it was shit, we lost the most important part of the game for fans (celebrating goals, of which soccer has few), let's go back.

The technology fails, too. Here's a great example in hockey [1], where the match is over and the championship has been won, but only the shooter and the goalie know it. Hockey has a light and buzzer that go off if the sensors detect a goal, and it missed the most important one of that year.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy4UZbtxxkY

it'd be instant success for the leagues

I'm sceptical. An AI that could view the whole playing field at all time and instantly spot and call every rule infraction with 100% accuracy would pretty much ruin any game. Knowing when to ignore an insignificant rules infraction in favour of letting the game flow is part of being a good ref. Plus, as a player, trying to get away with some sneaky bullshit when the ref isn't paying attention is part of the game.

Players will adjust or the NBA/NFL would change the rules to better suit the capabilities of the AI.

The NBA would be a very different game if an AI called things by the book. The first season would be _hilarious_. Some games wouldn't go a minute without a call for travelling.

I disagree. Several rules are ambiguous, leaving the judgement to the ref.

If anything, I think that refs need to be enforced more to call games a particular way. The officiating that occurs during the playoffs is much better, and IMO should be done that way during the whole season rather than only the playoffs. Refs let defenders be more physical, they call more rule violations, etc.

I'd fear that an AI ref could possibly lead to even more fouls being called, since a ref could miss things depending on where they are in the floor. More fouls being called would just slow down the game.

In discussing AI they lament bias. In discussing human judges they laud the fact nationality and body shape and the judges seat position plays a role. So, when a machine is biased it’s a problem but when nationalism, racism, etc is rooted in a human judge it’s a feature? Technology really shouldn’t be written about by journalism majors.

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