Stealing Baseball Signs with a Phone (Machine Learning)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a fun, semi-technical intro to machine learning that holds kids' attention.
What it is
Mark Rober and Jabril build an app that uses machine learning to decode baseball sign sequences. The video also explains neural networks in a simple, accessible way.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2019 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec lnwlebjel · 2023-07 · on “Ask HN: What YouTube channels do you watch with your kids?”
Mark Rober has many great and some good science and engineering videos that my kids love: [LINK] He get's my vote for the current best communicator of science, on par at times with Carl Sagan. This video explains neural nets/machine learning and had my kids riveted: [this video] We've gone down some deep lego rabbit holes, such as the great ball contraption: [LINK] These are pretty light but entertaining: [LINK] [LINK] The latter is a guy that builds fresh water aquariums. The fact that he can do this full time for a living (via YouTube) is one of the most amazing and unlikely results of the internet (IMO).
Recommends TOMDM · 2019-08 · on “On-Device, Real-Time Hand Tracking with MediaPipe”
I'm not sure if the complexity of the codes is significantly higher in the pro teams, but I found this video on baseball code decoding pretty fun. [this video] Combined with this, it certainly seems like there's potential for a fully automated pipeline
Recommends binarymax · 2020-02 · on “Say It Is So: Baseball’s Disgrace”
Here's a fun (semi) technical video on using machine learning for sign stealing: [this video] I wonder if the signs employed by Major League teams are as simple as the ones dissected above?
Cites slg · 2021-06 · on “The cheating scandal that nearly ruined baseball”
The cheating aspect is using any outside technology. A runner on second isn't forbidden from trying to steal the sign and communicate it to the batter. However you aren't allowed to have someone watching live video, using binoculars to watch the catcher from the outfield, or any other technologically aided approach to stealing signs. Plus teams often do "encrypt" their signs. That is why you might see a third base coach give 10 different signals. Only one or two of them are needed to convey the instructions. The rest are just used to hide the true signal. However it is now trivially easy to decrypt these signs using machine learning. Here is a video on it.[1] [1] - [this video]