If, like me, you like both rugby and technology/IT, you may find the following article interesting.
Well, AWS hopes you will because they're doing AI/ML/etc for it
For those who don't know, The Register is an IT industry news website with a caustically cynical bent. AWS is Amazon's (the online shop) provider of servers and internet services.
Essentially, AWS is planning to apply a range of modern, computer based analytical techniques to a variety of rugby stats, in real time. Could go either way - interesting, or a failed publicity stunt!
Could be interesting - but, my experience of these models is that they are very data hungry. A statistical model based on a handful of kicks is likely to be inaccurate. If there were 1 trillion kicks in the game, then the model could start predicting accurately after the result of the first 100 billion kicks or so.
I think that Opta did this sort of analysis last season - but I can't see that they are involved this season - which probably explains why Amazon are getting involved.
theregister.co.uk