When will Badminton become a sport without human intervention

Discussion in 'Rules / Tournament Regulation / Officiating' started by Baddyforall, Jun 9, 2022.

  1. Baddyforall

    Baddyforall Regular Member

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    We have Line Judges and Service umpires. Line judges' mistakes can be corrected by using Hawk Eye. How about the mistakes of Service Umpires and Umpires?.
    There are many chances of them making mistakes while judging. Service faults even after the introduction of 1.15m height measurement is questionable sometimes. How could we question them? There should be some mechanism to identify their mistakes, like "crossing over the net fault and service fault". What do you guys think?
     
  2. phihag

    phihag Regular Member

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    HawkEye has made numerous mistakes, but it's not seen as much of a problem, because people put more trust into a machine than a human. To entirely replace line judges would require major modifications to HawkEye, improving accuracy, speed, and cost each by a factor of 10-100. That's why we still have line judges years after introducing HawkEye!

    And line judging is far, far easier than judging the complexities of human interaction. Could IBM set up a Deep Blue / Watson / AlphaZero-style system to umpire a badminton match? Probably, given a couple years and a specialized development team. Would it be cheaper, or even cost less than 10x of what umpires cost? Unlikely. Would it be fairer in actual games, after players learned to trick it? Not for a long time.

    If computing progress continues to develop exponentially, and AI technologies continues to improve, it's likely that there will be automated umpires eventually. But since these are exponential and chaotic processes, it's extremely hard to accurately predict them. For example, it could be that only in 2100 we have such a system, years after badminton has been switched to an e-sport, where competitors play against each other from their own homes because VR has become so much better.

    As long as we haven't even replaced line judges, and don't even have a system to assist service judges, all I can say is such an umpire replacement system will be at least 2 decades out, but it easily could be a century or two.
     
  3. BadmintonDave

    BadmintonDave Regular Member

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    Maybe one day they will make the edges of the court out of some kindof metal and have special shuttles with a coating on that completes a circuit if it touches the outer lines. So you would hear a sound if the shuttle touches the line
     
  4. phihag

    phihag Regular Member

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    I'm not sure how that would work, and I see many problems:
    1. Shuttles would fly differently.
    2. Shuttles would be much more expensive. The court would be much more expensive.
    3. Which circuit would be completed? There is nothing on the other side of the metal.
    4. The system could easily spuriously activated by a player's racket or shoe on the line.
    HawkEye is so successful because it can be integrated seamlessly into any setup with relatively low effort. But it still needs a lot of cables & expensive cameras, and a dedicated room for all the computers.
     
    mobin2012, Baddyforall and Woesi like this.
  5. Baddyforall

    Baddyforall Regular Member

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    Hawk Eye is good but still it is questionable. Whereas we could ask them to address the "Cross over the net" thing. Because many times, it will decide the outcome of the match. In this case, we are not intended to blame Umpire. Because human eye has limitations. That's why, we need to address it .
     
  6. psyclops

    psyclops Regular Member

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    With my experience in multisport events and databases, I would respond to your heading title with "when badminton is played by non-humans." Some would call this as a video game!

    Or it could be BadmintonAI, or AIBadminton (not to be confused with Air Badminton).

    Also, if you poll the players on the circuit, would they rather be umpired by person or with technology only, I figure, they would pick the former.

    The other counter point is that players are also human and make mistakes. Coaches too. It is for this very reason, we can have discussions, and discourse, and this can only be good for the game. Isnt it?

    Technology is there to improve officiating, so if there is no proper training in using the technology, then it is a fail.
     

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