Siri, What The Hell Is Curling?

With the winter Olympic Games here again, and Sochi exactly twelve hours off from us on the US west coast, we tend to get some odd stuff at odd hours during the day.

Yeah, I know that all of the “good” stuff is recorded, re-packaged, “accented” by “human-interest stories”, and then regurgitated back at us every night for four or five hours in prime time. You really don’t want to get me started on how I’ve felt about that for about the last forty years.

Compared to previous years, when NOTHING was available live, this year there seems to be a fair amount of it — starting at midnight here in LA and going through noon. I don’t do those hours. By the time we get up and moving it’s mid-evening in Sochi and most of the live stuff is over. So then we get three or four hours of stuff mixed in with the remaining live stuff going on.

This morning we watched the US women’s hockey team demolish the Swiss team — if we’re going to have games where we’re up 5-0 in the first and winning 9-0, they might want to consider a mercy rule. 

We also got a lot of curling, that odd sport with the forty-pound rocks being slid across the ice with a couple of people with brooms sweeping in front of it. Like 99.9% of everyone who watches this, we immediately googled the rules and terms, which helped a tiny bit. Ten ends (like baseball innings), eight stones for each team, each of the four players on a team throw two stones per end, you try to hit the other team’s stones out of the “house” (target circle), whoever has the stone(s) closest to the center at the conclusion of the end gets points. The funky sweeping thing helps to speed up a stone as it glides, or can be used to guide its path just a tiny bit.

Even with all of that, listening to the guy describe the action was like listening to a British announcer describing cricket. It all starts to sound like a “Mad Libs” game. You can recognize nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and so on. From the tone of the announcer’s voice (sometimes he’s whispering like he’s right next to the 18th green at Augusta, sometimes he’s shouting like a Brazilian soccer announcer after a score) you can get the gist of whether or not something good or bad has happened — but half the time I had no idea at all what had happened that might be good or bad, or why it might be good or bad.

In that respect (and so many more, but this is a good example) I’m so much looking forward to the development of things like Siri into actual Artificial Intelligence systems. I would love to sit there watching curling (for example) and be able to ask the house/television/phone/whatever system for an explanation and get a personalized and knowledgeable response back.

“Sara, why is that man screaming now? What happened?”

“Paul, it seems that the googlywomp was confliggered by the justifrap in the fifteenth cycloidgram, of course.”

“Sara, can you use words that I could understand and explain why certain things are significant?”

“Only if you use the magic word.”

“Sara, can you PLEASE use words that I could understand and explain why certain things are significant?”

“Of course, it would be my pleasure. The people in the TV threw rocks across the ice and hit the other rocks.”

“Sara, PLEASE stop screwing with me and just answer the damn question.”

“Well, if you’re going to be like that about it. In order to score, the team throwing the red stones needs to end this round with one or more of its stones closest to the center of the target. The closest stone to the center right now are two yellow stones. The red team needs to find a way to bump those two stones out of the way, or to get one of their red stones even closer to the center. However, strategically, even if they put a red stone right in the middle of the target, the yellow team can then simply try to knock it out of position, so with their earlier stones they need to set up some in guarding or blocking positions in front of the center target. That stone was a good throw because it knocked one of the yellow stones out of play while leaving the red stone in a good blocking position.”

“Thank you, Sara. Can you explain to me why this ever became a sport?”

“It’s because in places like Canada and Sweden and Russia, the winters are very long and very cold. Before modern electric conveniences, people there tended to have little to entertain themselves for month upon month, but they had plenty of ice and rocks. Thus was curling born.”

“Fine, Sara, but why are the still playing it even when everyone has a satellite television link and an Xbox and a computer and an internet connection and a car?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that one, there doesn’t appear to be any data.”