PUBLISHER elizabeth marincola
EDITOR IN CHIEF Tom Siegfried
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Artificial or otherwise,
athletes need intelligence
Suppose you could build an artificial
brain that could think scientifically, able
to identify general principles of nature
by studying results from many experiments. Scientists could gather a lot of
data and then let the computer discover
the secrets hidden in the numbers.
Sure, it sounds like science fiction. But
computers capable of such scientific creativity already exist, as
Rachel Ehrenberg reports in this issue (Page 20). In particular,
a project called Eureqa (weird spelling of an Archimedean
historical allusion) has shown surprising skill at turning raw
data into equations capturing well-known physical laws.
It’s unlikely that scientists will give up using their own
brains to seek discoveries anytime soon. But Eureqa and
similar systems could provide a helpful aid in dealing with
the deluge of data that modern technologies produce. You
could imagine methods for diagnosing diseases that not only
detect known disorders, but also identify previously unrecognized maladies.
Just a bit more fancifully, you could conceive of thinking
machines helping sports coaches know whom to draft by
analyzing activity in athletes’ brains. Size, speed, strength
and stamina can be easily measured at tryout camps, but
such objective physical measures frequently fail to predict
who will become a champion and who will consistently
choke in the fourth quarter of every NBA Finals game.
It turns out, as Nick Bascom reports (Page 22), superior
athletic performance often depends as much on the brain
as on the body.
It’s not just about making better strategic decisions, such as
knowing when to take a pitch or when to swing away. It’s about
coordinating what the brain is thinking with what the muscles
should be doing, knowing how to maintain mental focus and
especially knowing how to keep the mind from being distracted by the emotional stresses of the situation.
Eliminating such stresses is what computers are really good
at, of course. So you could imagine that someday the NFL’s top
draft choice would be a computer-human hybrid, merging
top physical skills with the sharpest mental focus. And perhaps
coaches would be equipped with a Eureqa-like program for
finding equations that guarantee play-calling success. But a
good coach would have to be able to veto the computer’s play
calls. To make the best use of artificial intelligence, it helps to
have some of the real thing. — Tom Siegfried, Editor in Chief
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