AAAS Special from San Francisco:
mathematics: Secret of sports thrills spilled

SARA ABDULLA

Bowls: it's random walk is just as thrilling as any other 'big game'.

Bowls is just as thrilling as basketball. In fact "in some senses all sports are equally exciting", mathematician Thomas Cover of Stanford University proved to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco this week.

Mathematically speaking, Cover proposes, you are just as likely to experience the same number of mood swings watching third division English football club Leyton Orient take on the might of Manchester United as following Andre Agassi and arch rival Pete Sampras slug it out for a Grand Slam title.

This is because every clash, be it of titans or minnows, unfolds as what mathematicians call a 'random walk'. In other words, each twist in the sporting tale is as unpredictable as the last. No matter who is playing.

Cover calculates that the difference in what is at stake and the strengths of the opposing factions merely sets viewers 'mood boundaries'. So the expectation that an Agassi/Sampras title clash will be a close call and that an Orient/United head-off will be a pointless trouncing shifts the levels within which your mood randomly roves.

One upshot of this is that football commentators are not as fatuous as we like to think when they point out that "it is a game of two halves". In the strictest theoretical sense — which admittedly doesn’t account for Coach's half-time hollering — the second part of any match is as blank a slate as the first.

Unfortunately, Cover concedes, the rigour of statistics is no match for 'end play', where the team with little to lose but a lot to gain risks fouling or getting injured for the sake of a few vital points. So the next time you are flicking through the sports channels in search of a thrill remember this: the end of a game of bowls might even be more exciting than the middle of a basketball match.

see also: the AAAS website