Depends if this sport is going to be pure sport, or it is still going to be half artistry (I hope for the latter).
If it is pure sport, then yes. Speed, Height, Distance, Trajectory, power, centering, coverage etc in performance should be measured and accounted for with raw data to support human judgement. They should be used as reference points since your speed, power at various part of your program MUST and SHOULD reflect upon the music and choreography intentions. A skater is likely to skate slow during slow sections, fast and sharp under more exciting sections etc.
However as long as the sport has artistry involved, human judgement are absolutely necessary, but it will need to be a transparent process. Ideally the judges need to have an established carefully guarded and respected reputation that is trusted by the general public and skaters, and they need to be able to explained via qualitative terms with proper expert opinon not just via numbers.
Lots of good points there. However, regarding the numbers, I think it's important to also keep in mind the purpose of the technology or any other measurement method.
Ultimately at the end of the day it's about how to rank skaters. For whatever psychological reason, people want to see that (i.e. who was "best" or 1st place, 2nd place, etc.). Scores are the means rank the skaters. So the discussion is really about, what is the best (or at least, what is a better) way to do the scoring to rank the skaters. As mentioned already technology is one way but it's not the only way and it can't measure everything (i.e. things like artistry). However, even with technology, there's something else that has to be done by humans: the scoring. What I mean is that technology can at most only measure a quantity. It cannot provide value (i.e. score). At most the technology will be able to say for example "during that jump the skate was -83 degrees away from three full rotations." It is up to the humans, i.e. the experts, to say "well then it should be worth X points." Sure, once there's a measured quantity, then the computer can calculate a score based on that quantity, but how to calculate the score -- the relationship between the measured quantity and the value in points -- is still given by a human, i.e. expert.
The advantage of using technology is to reduce the error in human judgment about those measured quantities -- rotations, edges, and so forth. It cannot replace human judgment about what's valuable and what's not. This thus
increases the transparency of the process. Under the current system, far as I know, wrong edges and such are called by the technical panel. Although we know their guidance via the rule book, their deliberations are opaque to us (we don't know the specific reasons for why a wrong edge was or wasn't called). Thus the process is not only prone to human error, but it's also prone to influence (i.e. politics/corruption/bias), and
we are unable to distinguish between the two. By having technology make the measurements, the process reduces that problem -- we could have something like "that jump was -103 +- 2 degrees away from a full 3 rotations". Presumably the technology is better than the human eye at making those measurements (otherwise it's not useful) -- hence using it where appropriate would
increase the reputation of the judging process. The expert opinion then would be on how difficult each move was (i.e. how many points it would get) -- backed up by the actual numbers to ensure that human error, bias, politics etc. wasn't introduced to unfairly skew the results.
Sure that human judgment is necessary but why should it be the judgment of a handful of individuals? If I get it right, the artistry means being creative, entertaining, touching and capable to appeal to us general public. The often conservative taste of judges doesn’t support it at all. Why don’t we leave it to the common sense and taste of skaters? Despite that they wouldn’t be rewarded for that in terms of medals, they know very well that they can be rewarded in terms of show ticket sales if they prove that they can be also great artists.
I don't think potential ticket sales is necessarily a good way to rank skaters. In the (classical) piano world, Lang Lang is by far the biggest moneymaker. But many pianists have serious reservations about what he's actually contributing to the field compared with current pianists such as Hamelin, Tsujii, or perhaps Yundi Li. He's certainly talented, but in classical music he's known more for his facial and physical antics (and good enough technique to play the right notes while doing them) rather than breaking new ground in expressiveness, artistry, conveying emotion, musicality, etc. The sad reality is that for many classical pianists, if money was the primary metric, then they should just play background music for voice shows like American Idol and forget about classical music.
To a certain extent, yes, any endeavor needs to consider whether or not it's able to bring in money, for survival if nothing else. But I don't think the ability to get money is necessarily the same as quality.
I♥Yuna;885480 said:
That tech exists today, it's used in smartphones (to determine whether you're holding it vertically or horizontally) an could be refined and applied to a skating boot w/wireless communication to the tech panel's computer.
I think the main problem would be developing all of this tech (time it would take to break out of experimental stage and the cost to actually implement it) and glitches, like the boot sensor failing to record data, or failing to transmit it (where does that leave the tech panel? how to score fairly in the event of a serious glitch?).
Although the technology is available in a smartphone, I don't know if it's robust enough to work inside of a skate, which is subject to quite a few big shocks. I also don't know if skates are the best place for the technology, since it is in the skater's possession and thus more easily tampered with. I'd lean more toward an external solution such as cameras with image-recognition and measurement software. Although this would cost money, I'm not sure it would be all that much. After all, cameras are already in use at a lot of places, especially for more high-profile events. Just consider the cameras that the technical panel has (actually, I don't know how many they use). So it's not a matter of going out and getting new hardware.
The main difficulty is in the software. There's a fair shot I could write it myself if I had the time (I have some background in image processing and wrote an optical character recognition program to analyze a game before). The video analysis I would think is fairly straightforward; edge detection to identify the skate location in the image, then some processing knowing the location and some other parameters of the camera(s) to calculate the skate's location in space. Probably even easier if the camera can resolve the ice, for example the figure that the skate is leaving behind as it moves, as a reference point. That would be a hardware requirement on the camera though, and also somewhat a software requirement on the video quality (for example, it likely couldn't do this on videos from Youtube since they're heavily compressed). Then it's just a matter of doing this for multiple frames and eventually you can work out the skate's location in space over time, and thus calculate the relevant quantities (such as edge and rotation). It seems like an undergrad project, and once completed, it could of course be copied to wherever it's needed. Maybe I'm understating the difficulty of this, but I don't particularly see where there might be major problems.
If the system doesn't work because of a breakdown or whatever, then you just revert back to how it's done now -- humans eyeballing it from replays. The system is meant to be an improvement, not the only way that's allowable. I would hope that even if the system is in place then the judges are still competent enough to be able to judge events if needed, just that the system would provide for more accuracy (and reduce judge workload) when available.
Also, although the system would have a cost, so does the current system of judges. Devoting manpower to measuring objective quantities has a cost in itself, not necessarily in terms of money (the judges don't get paid for it, right?) but in terms of the judges you need to have available, their own transportation etc. costs, and the opportunity cost of them not being able to do something else. The business case then is a tradeoff in paying a one-time cost of getting the software written (perhaps licensing fees if it's outsourced) and possibly making sure the right camera equipment is available, compared with the expenses for the manpower involved in manually measuring the quantities with judges, as well as the potential error and bias issues (i.e. legitimacy issues) with using humans as the measuring sticks. I don't think it's that unreasonable. Again though, it comes down to whether or not the organizers would actually be willing to relinquish the influence that they have over the outcome of competitive events. As I said above, the potential for human error is one way to cover up bias, corruption, etc.
@Vanshilar: You exampled many possibilities which I find all sound and encouraging. As for detecting the number of rotations, visual inspection may be enough as long as take-off and landing angles are automatically determined by machines. (it's easy to tell double and triple jumps apart) I also agree that the cost may not be the biggest hurdle due to bureaucracy and power involved. There is also a slight chance that audience may not agree with machine's readings if a skater excel at cheating, but with large screens and realtime slow-mo videos that can be overcome.
I'm sure there may be ways to cheat the system. The software's acceptance will depend on its reputation as being able to accurately and neutrally evaluate different skaters. Coincidentally or not, judges have the same issues -- with human factors thrown in.
Someone has mentioned it earlier (sorry I forgot and I am on mobile) that if figure skating wants to truly be more a sport than a presentation, then it should throw away the pretense of the latter because it wastes everyone's time and life. Why would anyone create new program under such a system? Just keep using one program with the same music (or without) for the entire career and you are set. No reason to learn new music/choreo, let alone perfecting one. This is a serious proposition. We should not cheat on athletes' lives.
I wouldn't say so. I'm not a figure skating expert but I would say it's more of an art form. The technique should be used to convey something, rather than being the end in and of itself, just like with any art. Take painting for example: pointillism (where the painting was made up of lots of little dots) was exciting not only because it was a new technique, but because it was able to convey a different visual effect than previous painting techniques. (Incidentally, it foreshadowed the technological use of pixels many decades later.) In piano playing, playing scales is a technique that everyone learns, but no one other than the pianist's parents will want to hear them play scales. But playing scales quickly does have its place as part of a piece in adding to the excitement; take for example, Hamelin's playing of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody 2 (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIMzL2-4bjg at around 7:45; that's 21 evenly-spaced notes in 1 second each run that you're seeing/hearing, or a new note every 0.05 seconds) where scales are used as part of the "exciting" section of the piece. As someone elsewhere mentioned, if figure skating were just about the jumps, then it just needs to be a 10-second thing of the skater doing a jump. The choreography and artistry is what ties everything together and weaves a bigger story with more emotional impact than just the technical elements.
then he deserves high scores in Interpretation, Choreography, and Presentation, respectively. This does not seem controversial to me. If he does a lot of Transitions, with variation and high quality, then he gets a good score in Transitions.
If no one lands a bunch of hard jumps AND presents something of value on the performing arts side, then the judges have their work cut out for them. If this NEVER happens, then figure skating will disappear as a spectator sport (and deserve to, IMHO).
