BUH Blog

Modelling Football Plays

Dang it! Yet another idea that I never pushed hard to bring into reality - realized by another visionary (visionaries?) -> software for the evaluation of football plays. They claim to bring “proven game theory strategies into professional sports.” In the FAQ it says that “The core model replicates, with amazing accuracy, the play-calling and statistical outputs of typical NFL teams.” Sounds like some interesting modeling going on.

Well, just for the record - in case their methods don’t work out - here is a brief concept of how I was going to tackle (ugh) the problem. I was actually more interested in the evolution of new plays. How? The high fidelity of football video games (even at the time I was looking at it in the mid-1990’s) would allow for potentially trying out new plays against all types of competitors. The new plays would be created using genetic programming techniques - at least that was my initial thought process. I actually spoke with several people about it, but I think it was a little too “out there” for most people to conceptualize the basic process. Well - good luck to Pig Skin Revolution!

retrievr - example based image search

Okay, so you are looking for a picture of a bunny rabbit.  How do image searches work today?  Well, go over to Google’s image search and it is all based on keywords associated with images on web pages.  However, just because someone tags an image as “bunny rabbit” does not mean it will be a bunny rabbit.

Enter retrievr - example base image search - where you draw what you are looking for and it trys to find images that match your sketch.  retriever is an experimental image search that is using Flickr images to search.

Experiment with retrievr and see what you can find.  It isn’t great - but it is fun and like any technology that is not mature today - give it some time and I am sure there will be some real progress.