“Triple Axel Twist: Unleashing the Power of AI to Propel Olympic Skaters Towards the Quint”
“3 Questions: Using AI to help Olympic skaters land a quint”
“‘I think the most general takeaway from this work is the effectiveness of AI in engineering tasks,’ says MIT PhD student Michael O’Reilly, first author of the paper. ‘It is powerful in both its ability to design complex systems and to understand them.'”
So, MIT PhD student Michael O’Reilly has clearly been having a whale of a time playing around with artificial intelligence (AI). And where has he chosen to flex his newfound AI might? Olympic figure skating – the natural testing ground for any self-respecting scientist, obviously.
The objective? Enable athletes to land a quint. For those not familiar with ice skating vernacular, it refers to a jump with five complete rotations. We’re talking physics-defying stuff here people. To show just how hard this is, no one in the history of the Winter Olympics has ever managed to pull it off. But fear not, a dose of AI might just be the magic wand everyone’s been searching for.
How does this ice-breaking (pun intended) innovation work? MIT’s AI wizard has developed a computer model that can analyze different methods for executing jumps, focusing on body positions and rotations per jump. The idea is that by employing thousands of these AI-powered simulations, athletes can identify the most efficient way of pulling off a quint. All without injuring themselves or turning into a human spinning top, which is always a bonus.
How effective can this model be? The answer to that question seems to be skating on the positive side of skepticism. They’ve already managed to tweak a skater’s approach to a quadruple jump (that’s a jump with four rotations, for the math-challenged). Should we expect skating rinks to soon resemble scenes from ‘The Matrix,’ with AI-designed skaters defying laws of physics left, right and center? Hold on to that thought.
The research doesn’t stop here. The team wants to take AI further into the realm of sports science, targeting athletic performance across the board. Maybe they’ll even look at how AI can help discern the offside rule in soccer, because, honestly, no human seems to understand it. Jokes apart, this opens up an interesting avenue of exploration, one where AI isn’t just used to answer emails and power smart homes, but to provide a futuristic take on sporting performance. This is truly AI’s version of “go for gold”.