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It's always hard to take your eyes off Serena Williams. But it’ll be especially tough at this year’s U.S. Open, where the tennis champ is currently working toward a single season Grand Slam. She’s just so darn good. But what is it, exactly that makes her so good?
Sure, we can all speculate—it’s her power, her serve, her stamina, the way she controls a point. But we can’t calculate precisely what makes her game so special. IBM believes it can.
Since 1990, IBM has been working with the United States Tennis Association to support the technological infrastructure of the U.S. Open. Back in the day, that meant generating scores and keeping the website up and running. Today, it means doing those things while also analyzing millions of data points about every player, every stat, every point, in every tournament, extending back for decades to derive insight about how a given match—or career—will play out.
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/ibm-us-open-serena-williams-data/
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @12:30PM
If it really can predict the next Serena, they should bet a substantial amount of money on its prediction. It would be a sure bet. If they don't do it, it must be because the prediction is in reality nothing else than a guess which is no better than the guess by anyone who's knowledgeable in that sports (indeed, probably more so, because the humans can factor in other things not easily put into numbers (like how exhausted she looks after her games, or yellow press knowledge about things happening in her life which may occupy her mentally and thus affect her performance).