Golf club manufacturers are always trying to produce the best new type of club and there have been for as long as people have been playing golf. Going between different materials, club head shapes and sizes, weights, and many other things, golf clubs are seemingly always advancing and changing. However, there are rarely immense changes in the overall layout of the clubs or how they were designed, (despite what the advertisements would like you to believe) until recently. Who would have ever thought that supercomputers and machine learning could result in longer and straighter drives on the golf course? A recent innovation in golf club technology has resulted in just that. In the new drivers and fairway woods produced by Callaway, a popular club manufacturer, recently created a driver face unlike anything else in the field. The driver’s face was created by a supercomputer running for about four months straight and running countless simulations to produce the best thing it could with the given restraints. The driver has taken the golf world by storm, by receiving rave reviews from pros and average golfers as well as producing unheard-of jumps in ball speed which results in longer drives. According to Callaway, most drivers go through about eight to ten iterations before the final design but with the supercomputer, this driver went through over 15,000 different versions before the final design. Eventually, the $5 million supercomputer at Callaway produced the driver face that so many golfers use today. According to Callaway using design methods that are commonly used throughout golf club manufacturing this design would not have been possible to create, and if a modern-day laptop was tasked with the same goal it would take around 34 years to compute the amount of data used by the supercomputer.
The face that the supercomputer designed is unlike any other driver face being used in golf. Primarily, the driver’s face has seemingly random “valleys” that produce the highest ball speed ever seen from a legal driver. The driver face also features thinner materials towards the center or the driver which contrasts the trend of drivers having thinner materials towards the edge of the face used by the industry for around two decades now. The driver as a whole was not completely AI designed though, the computer was programmed to only develop the driver face and the normal design team at Callaway was still responsible for the rest of the driver head, weighting, shape, etc. Callaway gave the computer certain parameters so that the driver face would still be legal by the rules of golf which regulate aspects such as the coefficient of restitution (bounce), and size of the club. So while the supercomputer did not completely design the driver, it is still very impressive that it created something that has revolutionized the way golf clubs are designed.
I decided to write my blog post about this new golf technology because after recently reading WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM, this good idea came from AI which was not included in the book. While I understand that the only “good ideas” that AI can produce are those with strict parameters and are purely physical, it is still interesting that a supercomputer created something that humans would be unable to create and are not entirely sure how it works, but it created something that essentially blew the previously human-designed technology out of the water. Callaway’s head of research and development vocally stated that when the supercomputer was finished, he and others at Callaway were very nervous because were they unsure of why the computer created what it did and whether it would work at all. The director said if the driver did not work they would be unsure how to fix it because the result was so advanced and precise. But the driver was a resounding success and is being used widely all over the world. So I am very curious, what else could AI design that would be way ahead of human design? How far can we take the AI design process? Is it only a matter of time before AI designs are being widely implemented? I think Steven Johnson would have some interesting things to say about the “good idea that Callaway produced. Would he consider it another platform and an expansion of the adjacent possible or would he consider this new paradigm something of its own? I’m just glad that I gained a few yards on my drive for now.
Article: https://www.todaysgolfer.co.uk/news-and-events/equipment-news/2019/january/what-is-flash-face-technology-/