Move over sport commentators, here come 'live' computers

Washington

COMPUTERS have already been trained how to write up quick summaries of sporting events after studying the box score, putting the jobs of sports journalists at risk. Now comes the next step: live commentary of professional sporting events as they actually happen, thanks to a combination of machine learning and computer vision.

In India, for example, computers are able to provide text-based commentary of cricket matches with 90 per cent accuracy, according to a recently published paper by a group of three Indian researchers, Rahul Anand Sharma and CV Jawahar - scientists at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad - together with Pramod Sankar Kompalli of Xerox Research Center India.