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Comment by shadowerm | Hacker News Reader

No, this is a stupid idea for people who don't know anything about boxing.

Effective aggression and ring generalship are subjective human judgements. Boxing results are varied because in a championship fight, many times rounds will be completely subjective.

If you made boxing judged by AI, the rules would quickly be gamed. I suspect it would turn into a contest of jab/output and completely ruin boxing.

What ultimately makes boxing great is a fight today doesn't look that much different than a fight 100 years ago. That is the whole fun of it.

It is a really a symptom of a culture obsessed with scientism. As if adding a bullshit layer of scientism makes things somehow better and "smarter".

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> If you made boxing judged by AI, the rules would quickly be gamed.

I though boxers were already gaming rules and this is effectively what gave rise to stuff like MMA.

Fans got tired of seeing a victor based upon technicality and skill and rules. Fans wanted a victor based upon being beaten down.

It's kind of interesting in that I'm not that interested in this for boxing but would rather see these kinds of systems in stuff like gymnastics or ice skating. Gymnastics and ice skating get absolutely skewered for the fact that you have to be "politically connected" in order to score well over time. I suspect that having an AI scoring system that winds up scoring performances correctly regardless of political connection would be godsend to those kinds of sports.

I count myself as a pretty decent fan of boxing. To argue that the rules are not already being gamed is pretty shallow. Winning by points is pretty much standard. Providing one additional judge that auto-tallies wouldn't kill the sport.

And I do believe the sport would benefit from, say, 3d reprojection to see a different view, or a heat map of hit vs throw locations, or a reproduction of movement throughout the ring.

Other sports have had these deep stats for a long time, and boxing has what, jab counts, points, and knockdowns? Come on. I love the sport and I love data.

> …completely subjective.

That may be. But all the gamblers demand objectivity. Whether or not this technology provides objectivity is not knowable now, but it has the empathetic storytelling that it does, which is all that matters for the marginal gambler.

Good comment. When we parse, data science, and algo a barely structured brawl, sports are donezo and we get too far away finally from being human.

I don't understand. Why would an AI judge inherently be more perceptible to being gamed than a human judge?

I believe the argument would be that humans are inconsistent, fallible, and gameable in idiosyncratic and individual ways not that they are less susceptible than AI.

Computer systems fail systematically, humans fail more randomly (for most classes of failure)

> humans fail more randomly

And often intentionally

Yep. The in-a-nutshell argument for AI is that there's an unusual amount of bias and corruption in boxing judges, who usually determine the victor. The in-a-nutshell argument against is that less subjective scoring systems like punch counting have already been tried as an alternative in Olympic boxing, but fans didn't like the adaptations in style that resulted. (Of course, dropping the punch counting for the 2016 Olympics immediately resulted in subjective judgements that were interesting at best...)

Sure but then you at least have basis to complain instead of “that’s just how the game is now.”

I don't see why we would need to say that, when we can debug and fix the system.

Not sure this holds, especially given the context of boxing, which is notorious for corruption.

A computer can only judge based on things that can be measured. Martial arts (and really sports in general) rely heavily on things that can't be measured such as aggression, spirit, toughness, etc.

They get measured when it matters - in who gets beaten down at the end, yes?

A toubling aspect of the "bullshit scientism" is that confidence/belief in "AI" seems proportional to human mistrust of other humans. Therefore it's success rests on fomenting division and mistrust amongst people and iconoclasm of traditional skills/knowledge. Artificial ("intelligence") is, in it's very definition, deceptive.

Which is ironic because trusting AI is fundamentally trusting the humans that made the AI over those that the AI replaces...

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