Boxing decisions by Artifical Intelligence

Your post was about landing MORE punches. Quantity.

Pro boxing isn’t about landing more punches.

One can dictate the terms of the contest. That’s what ring generalship is.

If you’re a pressure fighter and you fight another pressure fighter and you get backed up, he’s the one who is more effectively aggressive and he’s the one who is dictating terms, thus the ring general. But you could shoeshine and flail your hands and land more ‘punches’ still.

It’s one of the four points of scoring. You can like it or not like it, but it is and has been — just like you get points in basketball for putting the ball in the basket and in football for advancing the ball past the goal-line or in subjective scoring sports like gymnastics for keeping straight lines and other things that judges use as points for scoring.

 

And here I call BS. The pressure fighter getting backed up might be landing more punches. All things being equal, he should win. I don't care what "the story of the fight" is. That's subjective crap that serves to peddle BS decisions that serve the establishment. On those criteria I could, for instance, point out that Canelo guaranteed a career-ending KO in the third fight and yet delivered a timid and flat performance and therefore deserved to lose. I could, but I won't because I believe that he won that fight whatever the "story" surrounding it was.

 

So how cleanly they land and with how much force has nothing to do with it?

Let’s say you land 20 pitty-pat punches in a round. I counter five times with haymakers that land and two of them knock you down — you’re describing the patty-cakes guy as the winner of the round.

Go watch amateur boxing and count punches til the cows come home. It’s made for your view of how the sport should be.

 

Why shouldn't the pressure fighter that's getting backed up get points for adaptability? If they are both pressure fighters and one guy isn't fighting his normal style but he's still landing the better shots then why does his opponent get points for that?

 

For the third or fourth time, your post that I responded to said (twice) MORE punches. Not better.

And you’re the one who said the AI rates aggressiveness and pressure as points to score on — so I might ask you the same thing.

You’d have to see the actual fight to determine who’s winning the battle of ring generalship. Some guys fight well off the ropes but your AI would say ‘pressure and aggressiveness’ and give the guy who’s getting the worst of it credit.

 

I was going to state the same thing especially fighters that pit pat & evade & paying closer attention to it you see those punches aren't being thrown to hurt the fighter at all infact most were even being blocked my the other opponents forearms & hands instead they still get counted as punches landed when our eyes see the truth,

I've seen that transpire with both HBO & PBC compubox while the fighters where in a couple of exchanges so I never took them by fact but I just use it as a common gauger instead.

 

Knockdowns are extra as they have always been.

If I were to use your criteria then a guy like Golovkin would rank highly on damage since his straight punches are more powerful than most the looping shots of most guys. And here we are back to the subjective aspect of people having one fighter ahead simply because he is heavier handed than another guy. What happens when a lighter puncher known for little power drives a guy with an iron chin around the ring landing far more shots? That guy could lose a fight he should have won on the cards because of the subjective biases of the scorers. It has happened.

 

Any sport that is ‘scored’ by judges — boxing, figure skating, gymnastics, etc. — is going to be open to interpretation. AI isn’t some all-knowing godlike figure that arbitrates without bias … because if you build into it that aggression and pressure are to be rewarded (as the OP says) then it’s going to interpret results through that bias — and those two things in and of themselves are not within the actual rules of how to score boxing.

To make a simple analogy, one thing I hate about Punchstat is that it calls anything that’s not a jab a ‘power punch.’ That label brings with it the bias that non-jabs are all powerful, or at least more powerful than jabs. But you take a Larry Holmes or an Oscar de la Hoya or an Ike Quartey and their jab is certainly more powerful than a lot of right hands or hooks that another fighter (or even themselves) may land in a fight if they aren’t clean/full-force or even if the person landing the punch just doesn’t have much power.

Program AI to consider ‘power punches’ as being worth more than jabs and it is 100% guaranteed to come up with a result everyone will consider wrong from time to time simply by doing what it was programmed to do.

Like I said, you should go watch amateur boxing where all they do is count punches and every punch is equal if that’s how you think boxing should be scored — there’s a form of scoring that completely mirrors your view and it takes place at the amateur level.

You can argue that the four points of scoring are ‘wrong’ and fights shouldn’t be scored that way, but that’s an opinion and more importantly an opinion that is completely contrary to what judges are instructed to score … which is by the actual rules of the sport. I can think half-court shots in basketball should count 5 points and 80-yard touchdowns should count 10, but that doesn’t make the final score wrong because what I think doesn’t have anything to do with what the rules are.

Same for you and your interpretations about what ‘should’ be — it’s nice that you have an opinion but it is not valid to then say a judge got it wrong because he or she scored a fight by the criteria set out and ratified in the rulebook instead of by how you think things should be. You talk about the bias of the judges with no self-awareness that how you think things should be reflects your bias … the rules don’t have bias.

 

A fair post.

AI can be programmed any way the user likes though. I think it is a valuable adjunct to evaluate matches with because it is not swayed by external factors or by un underdog performing better than expected and thus influencing the judges to score a lost fight as being won. I like the dispassionate nature of an AI judge and I think that with more subtle programming a lot of your complaints (which have some validity to them, don't get me wrong) might be addressed.

 

Also to be considered is that a judge is watching live from a viewpoint at a low level on one side of the ring … and the other judges the same but spaced out to other sides. Us watching videos with multiple camera angles have a completely different vantage. (In HD, with replay — like we see all the time when people slow down films to show how ‘judges got it wrong’ … if you have to slow down the film to see it rather than at actual fight speed, you’re practically asking the judges to be Superman with X-ray vision when scoring).

And judges are instructed to not score what they can’t see. A fighter has his back to me and gets hit with a jab to the nose, I really can’t consider that punch because I don’t know if he got hit on the nose or slipped it or it fell a bit short or the sound I heard was it hitting the glove of the guy defending against it.

It’s not really that different than the judge not being allowed to substitute their judgment for that of the referee — the judge can’t say ‘I don’t think that was a low blow’ and refuse to deduct the point that the ref penalizes a boxer, nor can a judge say ‘that was a knockdown and he called it a slip’ and reflect that in their scoring of a round.

I don’t agree with every scorecard ever turned in or ever decision rendered — and there have been some bad ones — but I don’t think I’d agree with every AI card or decision either. Likely neither would you.

 

Now when I see someone typing that Al messed with the outcome of a fight, I'm not going to know if they mean Haymon or Artificial Intelligence.

 

Thinking the same thing haha

 

You're dense

 

Try to get AI to read my posts and explain them to you.

You just keep moving the goalposts every time you’re proven wrong about something. You don’t know enough about scoring boxing to even begin to discuss it intelligently.

 

I haven't men

I haven't mentioned anything about AI this entire time. Hence, you're dense.