The coolest research paper at Sloan this year is titled “Bhostgusters: Realtime Interactive Play Sketching With Synthesized NBA Defenses.” In the paper, a five-person team from the Technical University of Munich [and STATS, Disney Research Pittsburgh and Argo AI] aims to approach “play sketching from a data-driven perspective.” In layman’s terms, you can draw up a play on a touch screen using their system, then simulate how a defense might respond to it. Seriously. We’re basically living in an NBA 2K sim.
