Tiger Woods won his 80th PGA tour title this Sunday, September 23. I was planning to delve deeper into my MIT course on AI and study the details of natural language processing, specifically syntactic parsing and the value of training data. Instead, I found myself glued to a browser window for four and a half hours this afternoon, watching my favourite golfer relive his glory days, winning by 2 shots and capturing the Tour Championship. It was totally worth every minute.
You see, even though humans are being vastly outpaced by AI and machines at every turn, humans are still better at many nuanced tasks. Sure, you can program a robot to swing a golf club and hit repeatable shots, but even the best golf robots still can’t beat the best humans over 18 holes with all the nuanced shots required for a round. Still, they can make a hole-in-one from time to time:
Despite humanity’s increasing incompetence compared to machines, it is still incredibly fun to watch a talented person, who has worked their entire life to perfect their craft, get out there and show the world what they’ve got. D
Tiger didn’t win the FedEx Cup, the PGA Tour’s season-long points-based title, but he came really close. If he had, he would’ve made $10,000,000 on the spot. Not too shabby. Regardless, with the highest viewership numbers in the history of the tournament and crowds so large that commentators said they’d never seen anything like it, Tiger Woods undoubtedly made the tour, its sponsors and network partners well over $10 Million this weekend. The amount of value that he generates for the tour and for golf is almost incalculable.
Of course, if you’re not a golf fan, you probably think that it’s boring to watch. That can be said about just about any sport or event that one doesn’t understand. Something is boring to us because we don’t understand the context, the history, and the implications of a certain event happening. Once we understand the subject and can opine and converse with other people about the topic then it becomes much more real and tangible.
I think the same principle applies to artificial intelligence as well as finance. Few understand the topic. It takes time to learn and understand the nuances that make the topics interesting and valuable. Once one does build the knowledge and expertise to apply skills in these areas, the results can be extraordinary.
So I’m going to pose a question for my future self and any would-be AI experts. In 2 years, will we be able to build software that can perfectly predict the outcome of major events in sports, specifically golf tournaments, with better results than the best human statisticians and algorithms?
Before you say pfft and walk away thinking I’m a complete idiot for saying that, already this year, an AI has perfectly predicted the outcome of the Superbowl. Let that sink in.
It’s going to happen. My hope is that I’m the one building that software.