- Jan 28, 2011
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TL;DROn the black-box bollocks. It's almost certainly a misreporting of an approach by journalists don't really understand.
A blackbox is something like a neural network where you shove a whole load of variables into the mix and ask a bit of software to come up with an optimum outcome, where you set what that benchmark is. It's a black box because the human doesn't actually understand how it works, it's opaque, just that it comes up with an answer.
Like most alchemical myths it doesn't really work as it should, not on something as immeasurable as an optimum team dynamic anyway; how can the computer test all the counter-factuals? It can't.
In something like the betting game - my area of expertise - you can at least rerun matches ad infinitum and look at the bottom line, or have some kind of model score. Even then it's hard to beat something designed by humans using their experience and judgement, but tested on the same data, I can't imagine how it would work on something like player recruitment. What I do know is that companies like mine start out hugely excited by the potential, and seeming pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, only to find out it's usually a croc of shit. It's people like me, not experts, who get inordinately impressed by very clever mathematicians explaining their toys to you, and we get led astray. That's why I'd be extremely worried about football clubs getting seduced by the hocus pocus.
Anyway there won't be any magical black box, at best there will be football experts using some sophisticated analytics to help them home in on particular aspects, thus focusing their thoughts and decision making. That's what we should hope Mitchell and his team are doing.
It's just a fucking computer program.