AI EXPERIMENT IN HALFPIPE JUDGING AT X GAMES WILL GIVE SNOWBOARDERS A GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE

The X Games will experiment judging halfpipe runs this week in Aspen using artificial intelligence, the cutting-edge technology that could someday play a role in the way subjectively judged sports are scored.

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Long a trendsetter in action sports, the X Games and its new CEO, freestyle skiing great Jeremy Bloom, teamed with Google founder Sergey Brin to build the technology.

Using Google Cloud tools including Vertex Al, Bloom thinks this experiment has potential to change the game on halfpipes, then maybe on slopestyle courses, skating rinks and anywhere a judge is used to score a contest.

“Part of subjective sports, we see it all over the place, is that even at their best, humans can get it wrong,” said Bloom, who was a freestyle skier at two Olympics while also playing college football at Colorado. “Sometimes getting it wrong has huge implications. What if we could give judges superpowers and they could see things they couldn’t see with the human eye, and this technology could help inform them?”