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Comment by whizzter | Hacker News Reader

I think this is the problem with many "judgement sports", literally too much politics into it (see 2008 olympics wrestling scandal, suspending of all Rio Olympics boxing judges or the Pelletier/Sale olympic figure skating scandal).

Honestly most of these sports are losing popularity and money over unfair judging whilst athletics celebrates superstars like Usain Bolt that then draws crowds and new talents to these sports.

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They had to stop doing the military press in the olympics because the scoring got too difficult and political between the US and USSR in particular

There was one particularly bendy Russian strongman who was able to game the move by leaning backwards so far that he was almost doing a standing bench-press.

For fear of breaking their backs, no-one else dared to try this and the guy just dominated this event.

How hard would it be to replace a given sport's referees/judges/officials/umpires/whatever with with a system of sensors?

That question alone will tell you how objective the scoring will be. The winner of the 100m dash is almost completely unambiguous and objective, but sports like figure skating will always be doomed to some subjectivity in the scoring.

Just hit me that it'd be quite interesting given the advances in ML to see how well a computervision based system could be able to evaluate jumps,etc from these sports. Once skeleton-detection is in, then a ML system given historical scores matching relative bone positions(with some adjustments for era proficiency, athlete physiology,etc) should be able to be fairly accurate in giving unbiased scores and be able to flag abberations in human judging.

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