{"id":813,"date":"2004-01-20T04:35:57","date_gmt":"2004-01-20T04:35:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=813"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:33:27","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:33:27","slug":"sports-science-tennis-players-use-math-for-net-gains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=813","title":{"rendered":"sports science: tennis players use math for net gains"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Who knew? Your favorite tennis star may also be a  master of Bayesian probability theory, according to a study in the Jan.  15 <em>Nature.<\/em> Konrad P. Kording and Daniel M. Wolpert of University College  London report that the sort of visual and spatial judgments a good  tennis player&#8217;s brain has to make when she or he returns a serve are  based on mathematical principles formulated by Thomas Bayes over 200  years ago. (Bayesian theory, which concerns how outcomes are affected by  prior knowledge, helped give rise to modern statistics.) The  researchers tested people playing a computerized game that required them  to point to where they thought a target sphere would land, similar to a  tennis player having to judge an opponent&#8217;s shot.   It appears that  good players not only used information on what they saw around them, but  also used judgments they had made about variations in the speed and  trajectory of the ball from previous trials. <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Discoveries column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 1\/20\/2004.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Who knew? Your favorite tennis star may also be a master of Bayesian probability theory, according to a study in the Jan. 15 Nature. Konrad P. Kording and Daniel M. Wolpert of University College London report that the sort of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=813\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1090,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions\/1090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}