well pretty much nothing could be worse than amateur boxing rules and judges. even in a high level event like the olympics, almost every round was littered with times that legal punches obviously connected and no point was scored. in fact, one of the biggest problems is that even an impartial observer can almost never watch both fighters well enough to be able to score hits on both sides.

Make all sports players robotic too. Then all the money that would have been wasted on grown men playing kiddie games can go to improving the the lives of the general public.

Lets face it computer simulated atheletes could do far better then real ones, even all pumped full of horse testerone. They have benefits beyond performance as well; there cheaper, they wont beat thier wives, kill thier pregant girlfriends, sell crack to children or rape debutaunts.

. . . I’ve always thought that the officiating of the sport was part of the sport. It’s not perfect for a reason and it forces the players to try to exploit observations they make about the flexibility the refs may be unintentionally giving them.

There’s one big problem with computerizing the refs, though. What would the fans and sports commentators have to blame when their team loses an important match? It seems in the sports section the day after every big game, there’s some lunkhead complaining about this or that call being wrong, countered by some other lunkhead from the other team complaining about this or that other call being wrong.

Plus, I think they have a union, so they’d probably still have to be employed, but now they’d be the guy that hits the button when the computer catches something wrong. Kind of a waste of energy, if you ask me.

Since when have bad calls been appealing? The umpires are NOT part of the game, and they shouldn’t be. If you just want people making blind guesses, take down the foul poles, remove the baselines, take away the gloves and go back to the way the game was played 100 years ago. All these things were adopted for a reason, they made the game fairer (except gloves, which made it easier). If McEnroe were playing today, do you think he’d be having arguments with Cyclops (the tennis line judging machine)? Nope, and I don’t think anyone out there found his tantrums “charming”. The umpires, and rightly so, are afraid of losing their jobs to machines, but they shouldn’t be afraid of using machines to ensure they make the correct calls. Checking if a ball is a HR or foul takes less time than the manager arguing it out with the umpire and the umpire throwing him out, AND gets the call correct. These days, when we’ve got umpires and referees altering the outcome of games due to gambling, I’d rather have a machine verifying the results.

It looks like the major sports are already making sensible use of it. Line judges in tennis seem to be/have been a necessary nuisance, so that’s an example of a job that can be replaced by a machine. Ditto for some calls in team sports, such as home runs in baseball and field goals in football.

Machines won’t replace baseball umpires or football/basketball refs, though. Baseball is extremely tradition-bound, and umpires calling the strikes and put-outs are very much a part of that tradition (including the entertaining screaming machines they sometimes get into with managers and batters). Refs in football and basketball are constantly making judgement calls about which fouls to call. If that was done by a machine, there would be six fouls called on every play, and the crowd would head for the exits by the end of the first quarter.