Teams plug in to video game to evaluate talent in NBA

This definitely shows the potential of artificial intelligence to run real life simulations. Perhaps current gaming companies will eventually make large portions of their income through these sort of tailor made simulations.

interesting. But id have thought such tools would have already been used by managers and teams to evaluate several combinations. The only reason I can think of for depending on these games to give you an advantage is that the tools (if any) dont have a lot of these "combination" features. Or is this just more marketing?

Are the EA games really that realistic?

Weird example of life imitating art, I guess.

The latest NBA Live '09 has a feature called DNA. EA basically hook your PS3/NBA game up with another company that keeps real-time statistics of NBA players.

The moment you ran NBA Live '09 (and connected to the internet of course), EA will upload latest data from the previous night games. That includes player's tendency (going left, right, percentage of shoot on certain spots, and other usual stats).