Wimbledon ‘Stat Pack’ help explain the point

LONDON: In subterranean bunkers at the All England Club, statisticians are churning out millions of data nuggets during the Wimbledon championships, gobbled up by tennis nerds, players – and, increasingly, everyday fans.

Every single shot at the tournament is logged by US technology giants IBM, capturing 4.8 million bits of information – more statistics than they know what to do with.

But they are coming up with new ways of using the information to help obsessive tennis geeks and passing Wimbledon watchers alike to understand what’s really going on inside a match.

“We are trying to explain why a match is evolving the way it is. Statistics help bring it to life,” said Simon Boyden, who is in charge of IBM’s tech installations at the All England Club.

One new innovation this year is a momentum graph, showing how the balance of power shifts during the match – and statistically what lays behind it.

Even if players are behind, things might be swinging in their favour, such as improved service accuracy.

IBM are also now producing artificial intelligence- generated video clips, based on formulas which determine the most exciting moments during a match.

By monitoring a mixture of crowd noise, match analysis of key moments such as break points and player reactions, an overall excitement factor is produced for each passage of play.

Out of more than 29,000 points played so far during the 2018 championships, a clip featuring Rafael Nadal playing a shot between his legs, with an overall excitement factor of 0.92, is thus far deemed the most thrilling moment.

“Previously, we had video editors to make highlights. We asked, could we get a computer to do the same thing?” said Boyden.

The more it is used, the better the system should become.

British bias is factored in: the partisan home crowd are likely to cheer more loudly for British players.

“There is definitely an art and a science to it,” Boyden told AFP.

The highlights are used on the Wimbledon website and its YouTube channel, among other outlets.

Last year, clips of Roger Federer winning his eighth title did not top the popularity charts: that honour went to Nadal accidentally banging his head on a door frame.

100 per cent accurate, within a second – IBM has been the championships’ official information technology provider since 1990.

So far more than 54 million bits of Wimbledon data are in the system.

For all its tech whizz, the pointby-point data input – including where serves landed, rally length – relies on 48 statisticians sat courtside: regional-level tennis players highly trained in using the interfaces. — AFP