Sports analytics may be outnumbered when it comes to artificial intelligence

BOSTON — When it comes to artificial intelligence, the sports analytics crowd may be outnumbered.
The people who killed the sacrifice bunt and turned NBA games into a 3‑point shooting contest aren’t quite sure what will happen when AI fully invades sports — whether in the front office or on the field.

“I’ve been in computer science a long time. This is the first thing we don’t understand,” Philadelphia 76ers general manager Daryl Morey said Friday at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

“That’s mind-boggling,” Morey said. “We’ve actually now created something, with 0’s and 1’s, where every step we’ve made the creation, but we don’t understand the results.”
The MIT conference annually brings together thousands of number-crunching …