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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

Either train more with bald players, or do better at choosing the 'thing that is being converged upon'. Humans would be able to follow a game regardless of the shape or color of the ball's appearance.

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It's a hard task for young kids or anyone not used to watching sports. Ever watch a new sport with a child? They frequently lose sight/track of the ball/puck/etc.

A lot of it is learned heuristics. Things like how fast the ball normally travels, how hard it looks like the player threw or hit, game knowledge about places it makes sense for the ball to go, etc.

We don't train these algorithms while they are in active, live, use. If a human camera man mistook the bald head for the ball once in the game, he'd probably only do it once.

It reminds me of when I try to play any of the Smash Bros games. I can't keep track of my character on the screen ever. I don't know how people do it.

Those games are seemingly "visual cacophony to the point of difficulty and frustration" and I don't get the appeal. Most of my friends who enjoy it also tend to enjoy other fast-twitch games, as do I, but that game is a bridge too far.

I imagine for soccer the task of determining where the ball is based on player locations would be a lot harder than you think.

'Spot the ball' was a staple of local newspaper competitions - an action shot of a game with the ball removed by presumably pre-digital photographic trickery. Entrants were invited to mark a cross where they thought the ball might have been, and the closest to the original centre co-ordinates won a prize.

So yeah, surprisingly tricky, but you could set up a big training set along similar lines.

I've seen that online with big costs for guesses and prizes. Many years ago but I'm sure it is still around. I thought about how to computationally determine the ball position until I read that the ball position was decided by an impartial referee's opinion.

Actually not the original co-ordinates, but a point arbitrarily decided by a panel. I suspect that's where most people went wrong!

https://www.theguardian.com/football/shortcuts/2015/jan/14/h...

It would be difficult from player 'positions' in a single image, but the example given is obviously wrong if you consider motion of player positions over time--those player positions going back and forth with the 'ball' moving by itself along the sidelines.

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