How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team
#2I think nowadays such analysis plays a big part in sports. For example when Germany's football team beat Argentina in this year's World Cup I couldn't help but think that the German coach knows something the other coach (legendary Diego Maradona) doesn't.
Re: How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team
#3Re: How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team
#4best part:
fed to an ibm computer, capable of making 50k calculations per _minute_
Re: How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team
#5Reminds me a little bit about this article on Shane Battier: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?...
It goes into how Battier gets to see the charts and statistics for the players on the opposing team, so that he'll have better odds when defending against their jump shots.
Re: How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team
#6Is the K in Knuth supposed to be pronounced?
Re: How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team
#7I think nowadays such analysis plays a big part in sports. For example when Germany's football team beat Argentina in this year's World Cup I couldn't help but think that the German coach knows something the other coach (legendary Diego Maradona) doesn't.
"For example when Germany's football team beat Argentina in this year's World Cup I couldn't help but think that the German coach knows something the other coach (legendary Diego Maradona) doesn't."
I agree with you in general, but that's not the best example you could have used there.
Maradona spent most of the tournament boasting about not needing a gameplan, and saying things things like: "Nobody ever told me where to play. So I shouldn't have to tell Messi where to play, either".
Re: How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team
#8Is the K in Knuth supposed to be pronounced?
From: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/faq.html
It's pronounced: Ka-NOOTH
Re: How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team
#9I think nowadays such analysis plays a big part in sports. For example when Germany's football team beat Argentina in this year's World Cup I couldn't help but think that the German coach knows something the other coach (legendary Diego Maradona) doesn't.
I lack specific examples or links, but had heard a few years ago that U.S. pro sports franchises like the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots, to think of two, use a lot of "Quant" analysis in addition to traditional coaching methods. I'm sure everyone is doing it across pro sports now.
Re: How Don Knuth's computer skills helped his college basketball team
#10I think nowadays such analysis plays a big part in sports. For example when Germany's football team beat Argentina in this year's World Cup I couldn't help but think that the German coach knows something the other coach (legendary Diego Maradona) doesn't.
I lack specific examples or links, but had heard a few years ago that U.S. pro sports franchises like the Boston Red Sox and New England Patriots, to think of two, use a lot of "Quant" analysis in addition to traditional coaching methods. I'm sure everyone is doing it across pro sports now.
The MIT Sloan Sports Conference http://www.sloansportsconference.com/ is a mix of fan/stats/business people discussing numerical analysis of sports.
Bill Simmons (http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/simmons/index ) has interviewed his friend Daryl Morey of the Houston Rockets about this.
One interesting point is that there is no "salary cap" for sports statisticians, so rich teams are not restricted about what they spend on numerical analysis. Morey hinted that several (most?) NBA teams spend in the 7-figures on it.