Is this computerized sports commentator the end of Al Michaels as we know it?

The Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland has developed a highly advanced system that can commentate on sports games

The school, which we will henceforth refer to as EPFL, came up with a complex algorithm that uses several different video feeds, constantly monitored, to follow a soccer, basketball, or football game in the same way a human commentator might. It divides the field into a grid, and tracks individual players based on uniform color, number, and other cues, predicting the likelihood of each player’s entrance into each section of the grid.

Sports games have been doing this for years, with constantly-increasing levels of sophistication. They are always going to be moderately annoying, perhaps even more annoying than actual sports commentators.

-Drew Millard

[via]