A judging system that can score a routine from the angles of a gymnast's joints | Hacker News Reader

A judging system that can score a routine from the angles of a gymnast's joints

spectrum.ieee.org

29 pointssizzle11 comments

Judging in gymnastics already seems backwards to me: One person performs an amazing routine and then gets a low score when they stumble at the end. The next person performs a relatively average routine but gets a good score because they never stumble.

Analyzing joint angles seems like it would just further remove any sense of "soul" from the scoring criteria.

Thinking about this further, I think that maybe this is a fundamental problem with taking performance and making it a competition. Competition demands an objective standard when the quality of a performance is really about the subjective qualities like showmanship.

I see the same thing when games/sports become professional. It becomes about winning rather and gamesmanship than the characteristics that make the game/sport fun/meaningful/significant to begin with. For example, e-sports that remove the random aspects that make a game exciting because they aren't "fair". Or Mayweather vs. Pacquinao fight where Mayweather won using a defensive strategy; effectively winning by not fighting.

I've been saying for a long time that events that are based on someone else's subjective opinion should be removed from things like the Olympics. Gymnastics, figure skating, things like that.

If you can't measure the results it's not a competition; it's a popularity contest.

Part of the point is that the competitor chooses the routine based on what they can get the most points for. They are marked not only on quality of execution, but technical difficulty of the routine.

Crudely speaking, what this means is that a competitor aims to perform the most difficult routine that they can do perfectly.

This is not dissimilar to weightlifting.

This could also have application in a Dance Dance Revolution revival.

This reminds me of the "Everybody Dance Now" pose estimation algorithm. I'm not sure how they'd program in what a correct pose would be throughout all the duration of a single move, though.

I think it might change the sport a bit as gymnasts seek to emulate the machine's ideal. Might become a bit stale.

Goodhart's law!

Good connection! I looked it up, and it's interesting.

Now no one will be perfect!

I wonder if they'll calibrate the scores against past 10.0 performances

The tolerance is 1 cm so maybe someone can

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