For those
of us amateurs that struggle from week to week with our bowling scores,
wondering why this week strikes are elusive when last week our hand was hot and
the pins fell like drunken sailors, we may be groping towards an answer.
When it’s
our week to be on a roll, our confidence grows as we roll one strike and then
another. The next frame should give us that turkey, shouldn’t it? Our team
members would, of course agree, but what are the casual observers saying who
are viewing your rolling more like tossing a coin than appreciating your skill?
The
problem of whether a sportsman does periodically go through a hot hand phase
has been studied in the past. From the sportsman side, a certain amount of
superstition appears on the scene with lucky mascots, clothes etc. The subject
has now been re-opened by tossing the results from almost half a million frames
rolled by 100 top rank professional bowlers into a large computer at Yale U
(1). The work has been written up by Yaari and David and published in this
week’s Public Library of Science.
The stats
were elegantly handled and the results were clear and contradict earlier
studies. There is indeed a hot hand effect in that we get runs of high scores.
Hooray! All we need to do is schedule them back-to-back, maybe?
The bad
news for us dodos is that they are only temporal clusters in probability and we are not
getting it all together and that we are feeding back skill-based information to
our next throw.
So we’re
back to putting in our 10,000 hours of practice and hope that we do have some
talent to build on, but more importantly, that our joints will hold out.
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