It’s elementary dear Watson, keeping track of Wimbledon

LONDON: Deep in the bowels of All England Club, an army of employees from one of the world’s technology giants are teaching a computer named Watson to master tennis.

Seven-time Wimbledon champion Roger Federer can relax though. A silicon-chipped cyborg is not about to wreak havoc on his beloved Centre Court.

Watson is a cognitive computer designed by IBM that played Gary Kasparov at chess and beat the most successful contestant on hit US game show Jeopardy in a $1 million (`6.3 crore) challenge.

Its latest task is crunching tennis statistics and digging through Wimbledon’s vast historical archives to help feed the tournament’s ever expanding digital output and answer the queries of the world’s media churning out stories.

Want to know how many left-handers were in the men’s singles in 1979? How many aces Croatia’s Ivo Karlovic has served on the Wimbledon lawns? Was Wednesday’s heatwave a record?

Watson, says IBM, will be able to spit out the answer in around three seconds.

TEACHING TENNIS

“What we are doing at Wimbledon is teaching Watson tennis,” said Sam Seddon, IBM’s Wimbledon Client and Programme Executive who is at the heart of the operation.

“There is a data set at Wimbledon that sits in a huge structured database, then there is Wimbledon’s huge historical archive. Watson can receive a question from Wimbledon’s digital team in natural language, understand if it is a statistical question or a language question and then find the answer.

WHILE MATCHES ARE WON AND LOST ON COURT, NOT ON PAPER, THE ANALYSIS OFFERED IS POPULAR WITH PLAYERS AND COACHES