Scientists Claim Robots Can Write Match Reports

But Only for Baseball

According to a report on a German language website which looks at all things American, students from the Intelligent Information Laboratory of Northwestern University near Chicago have made a huge leap forward in the field of scientific discovery.

They have developed a software program that can write baseball match reports and could leave sports reporters unemployed.

During the match someone would simply enter all statistical information which as you know is quite a lot in the statistics-loving world of baseball, and finally, at the end, you press a key, that creates a readable article based on the collated statistical material.

The result looks readable and is apparently relatively fluid, according to the New York Times which saw one of the accounts. The researchers explain it is because match descriptions of the more repetitive sport are created formulaically by the lazier of the sporting fraternity in the nation’s press boxes, and certain sports are fairly hard to describe artistically because everyone starts by standing still.

The scientists say that the concepts too of winner and loser, favourite and underdog, expectations and surprises do not extend the mind much either as the thinking patterns you need to mentally come to grips with it are not that diverse.

They claim that they can also foresee that it would be easy to imagine that this system can be adapted to almost all sports, even to football, whose free-flow-dynamic in existing reports can be reduced to basic information, and subsequently enriched with a few quotations by coaches and players, that will become exchangeable like those more data defined sports.

At the moment, nobody knows if the system will ever be put into practice in reality. The researchers claim it will one day be used though. Financial pressure in the media will make it inevitable.

A robot is currently working on our reply to the research paper.

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