ISU Extraordinary Congress approves governance reform

[gsk8]

The International Skating Union (ISU) held today the first-ever Extraordinary Congress in its 133-year history, culminating in an extraordinary outcome: the approval of an extensive Constitutional reform by its Members. Convening both in Lausanne (SUI) and online, 94 voting delegates - out of a total voting membership of 98 - voted in favour of a significant governance shift.

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[lariko]

I like the potential of including AI to judge technical content. But nothing whatsoever on the single most interesting topic for me.

 

[Mathman]

On the AI front, I hope that the ISU moves with appropriate caution. I am reminded of this every time someone posts a screen capture with protractors and compasses drawn in to prove that someone's jump was rotated only 990 degrees in the air instead of 1080. Most of the time such measurements mainly just show ignorance of actual skating technique, rather that anything of value in terms of judging. An AI program would have to understand that a properly rotated triple toe-loop has more prerptatipon than a properly rotated loop -- and dozens of other "rules" that skaters, coaches and judges automatically intuit but are not so easy to codify into a self-learning computer program.

What such a program can learn to do, is to give out marks for various skating movements that mimic the marks that human judges tend to give -- sort of like an AI term-paper-writing tool that supplies students with a term paper on any subject, written in the style that human teachers give A's to when written by students. Well, OK. But we already have human judges. What do we really gain by employing robots that mimic them?

Plus, left to its own devices, the danger would be that the program would quickly catch on to how to be biased and political, rejoicing in iniquity just like their human creators.