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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

>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 "AI" already hallucinates doesn't it?

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!

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

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