The Controversial Machine That’s Ruining Bowling

bowling it's basically human nature people came up with bowling before we came up with written language money or making horses fight in our Wars and over the years new technologies improve the game bowling balls replaced rocks computers replac paper scorekeeping and someone invented those swingy chairs I love but a new new technology might ruin it all strings yep strung up pins are the hot new controversy in the bowling world but what are they for and are they ruining the game or saving it I send my outside correspondent Amy outside for answers but before we get to her very important research let's set the stage or rather the pins back in the day underpaid teens set up pins by hand but in 1946 AMF introduced a 2ton 9ft tall machine that could count clear and reset pins on its own and while it took more electricity than your average teen the automatic pin Setter eventually replaced pin boys all over the country models vary but here's basically how it works there are five main parts a sweep a pin elevator a pin distributor a pin table and a ball accelerator the ball accelerator just shoots your ball back to you but the other four parts jugle a total of 20 pins around collecting them organizing them and setting them up first it puts down 10 pins when you bowl the ball passes a sensor which says hey there's a ball here so the pin Setter drops it sweep in front to block any sneaky bonus balls at the same time a camera records how many and which pins are standing so the pin table basically a set of 10 holders with tongs can descend and pick them up then Mr sweep sweeps the table sets its pins back down and the Feld ones write a conveyor belt to an elevator to the pin distributor which would load them up and prepare them to be set back down but it's actually full right now so they just keep writing now you bowl again and don't hit anything because you suck at this so the pin distributor releases three replacement pins into the pin table which sets all 10 up for the next player up above pins come off the elevator and into the distributor and the cycle repeats seems complicated it is automatic pin Setters have over 4,000 th moving Parts including three motors and a shark switch which I'm told is a mostly unremarkable piece of plastic but I see it as this yes I spent the last my graphics buttion on that Parts alone can cost a bowling alley $33,000 a month on top of all the electricity pin Setters take and the full-time mechanic you need to tent to them in the last few decades bowling's popularity has waned and these costs have gotten harder and harder for alleys to Bear enter the string pin Setter these bad boys have fewer than 75 moving parts and you don't need a mechanic when they need a fix it's usually just the front desk team untangling some strings between labor parts and power string pin Setters can save bowling alleys up to 90% versus freef fall pin Setters with the added bonus that they don't crush people to death so the financials are good but what about the game surely stringing up the pins affects the physics right congrats you found the controversy Once Upon a Time string pinet manufacturers asked the United States Bowling Congress to certify strings for tournament play and the Congress spent 2 years on Research to decide under what specifications they might allow it they came up with several including that the strings needed to be 54 in or about 140 cm to prevent them from interfering in pinfall also they need to have a curtain or other arresting device 14 to 18 in or about 40 cm from the end of the lane to prevent string related Ricochet from knocking down too many pins with these and other specs in place the USBC found that their robot bowler named Earl bowled 7.1 fewer strikes and scored around 10 fewer points per game on strings Bowlers took this as you might imagine badly but the USBC still wanted to certify so they did a massive study with 541 Bowlers playing 3,550 games half on strings and half on freef fall and use the resulting pair data to make a 19-page document explaining whether strings actually ruined everything their study found that the average difference between a player scores on one type of pin cider versus another was less than one and they declared strings clear for tournament play for all you stat heads they ran a paired T Test and got a mean of .09 951 with a P value of 035 and their 95% confidence interval span zero which was a huge slay for the null hypothesis and I'm sorry I said all that but one of my writers got most of a stats degree and has got to use it somehow and while head riter didn't finish her stats degree she did enough to know that good results are replicable or at least that's what she told me when she took my credit card to go bowling four times like in the study Amy made all the players pick one bowling ball weight and stick to it for every throw in all four games this in theory eliminates a possible sorts of variants but oops three of them picked needlessly heavy ones and proceeded to bow disastrously for much of the experiment they played on strings first and while the sound on these things isn't nearly as fun as it is on freef Fall the group couldn't deny that the game was perfectly fun normal and fast moving complete with classic bowling alley graphics and solid mozzarella sticks that I hope I didn't pay for with two games down they headed to the next bowling alley an old school place whose freef fall pin sitters have been there since 1950 here you score by hand pins sometimes gets stuck on the side and do this and the guy had to come fix the pin Setter manually six times qualitatively the group had a blast at both places and would go back in a heart beat we're not here for fun we're here for numbers each player won one of the four games as far as spares and Strikes go the average differences were small with a group getting an irrelevant 375 more strikes and .25 fewer spares on strings in the overall scores Amy scored much higher on the strings while the other three did worse one only slightly the others a lot in total their average score was 3.6 pins higher on Free Fall than strings but with a P value over6 and a confidence interval that span zero this test has no statistical significance and agrees with the bowling Congress study you know to the extent it does anything which it doesn't also not for nothing around the eighth frame of the group's last game they put Freebird on the jukebox and all started bowling way better adding a new source of uncounted for variance aren't stats magical so string pin headers are they ruining bowling if you ask the US bowling Congress Amy or Amy's little friends no the sound is worse but the alleys like them and the game play is basically the same and while something doesn't sit right about having pins on strings they get bonus points for not crushing anyone to death I know this video wasn't about this but regular pin Setters really do crush a lot of people to death so if not doing that anymore ruins the game maybe the game was ready to be ruined remember all that stat stuff we were talking about in a minute ago T tests confidence intervals P values if you're like me and are not so math inclined all these things sound like nonsense but they don't have to thanks to this video sponsor brilliant just ask ging learning stats in a formal academic setting doesn't work for everyone but brilliant's quick intuitive interactive courses let you go at your own pace get a little smarter every day and explore whatever stem thing you're interested in without the high stakes and headaches of say a status degree that you think might be trying to kill you just as an example if you want to better understand the very study we focused on in this video check out their course on hypothesis testing which covers stuff that came up in in this video like the null hypothesis and variance and stuff we had to skip like statistical power and Anova tables these topics aren't just interesting they provide the basis for decisions as important as letting League Bowlers use strings as trivial as approving new medicines and everything in between so if you want to understand the world a little better or even just this video I can't recommend brilliant enough to try everything brilliant has to offer free for a full 30 days visit brilliant.org or click on the link in the description the first 200 of you will get 20% off annual premium subscription and you'll be supporting this channel too

Channel: Half as Interesting

Views: 1,226,124

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Id: PwQQhQWU3nI

Length: 7min 37sec (457 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 12 2023