Golf Club Atlas
GolfClubAtlas.com => Golf Course Architecture => Topic started by: Anthony Butler on April 26, 2023, 11:39:39 AM
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As analytics becomes a larger part of sport performance optimization and, as digital rendering of proposed designs and renovations becomes a bigger tool in helping certain firms win prestigious projects, (e.g. OCMs presentation to Medinah for the remodel of #3). it's only a matter of time until that digital asset (the representation of a future golf course) starts to be influenced by analytics that indicate certain design choices will impact resistance to scoring, green slopes and speeds etc.
Perhaps the only thing left or trusted to the human eye and mind will be the aesthetics of the experience, although AI-enabled visual composition tools like Midjourney could certainly create options or be used for 'decision support'.
Within 5 years, it seems likely that a design tool will be able to consume the inputs of a topographical survey of the selected piece of land, a construction budget, environmental permits, expected playing volume, projected maintenance costs etc. and produce a variety of routing and individual design options for the property developer to consider.
Whatever the timeline, it seems likely that the days of designers who prefer to 'work it out on the ground' will likely come to an end before we reach 2040.
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What a grim prospect.
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It's a discussion that probably needs to be had, (I believe there has been a little already).
Within 5 years, it seems likely that a design tool will be able to consume the inputs of a topographical survey of the selected piece of land, a construction budget, environmental permits, expected playing volume, projected maintenance costs etc. and produce a variety of routing and individual design options for the property developer to consider.
The previous are all things that are happening already, it's just that people are much more involved than they would ostensibly be in the future. It will be cheaper when a computer can do it more autonomously, but I feel like the process is the same. If it's the case that the clients who, right now, are hiring the "dig it out of dirt" guys are only doing so because they can't afford to hire the all of the above types, then yes, it would perhaps spell the end of the former. But is this the case? I don't think so.
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I will say it can be fun, and may be useful in the future, to use a program like Dall-e to generate ideas. (Peter Flory is the one who made me aware of using it for this).
I've actually done it a couple of times. The first time several months ago, and again just today. First off, the quality of the images has improved, just looking clearer and less noisy.
However, what I was looking for was something novel and maybe off the wall. The prompt I used back then was "The last human golf course, designed to be undetectable by the machines... Our only refuge from the war." I showed the results to others and one of the first responses was that one of the images looked like the 16th at Sharp Park. That was disappointing. It's impressive that these images can be produced out of whole cloth, but not great for ideas at this point.
Today's prompt was "golf course at the end of the world". I was hoping for some mushroom clouds or maybe a Bud Chapman painting. Instead, I got some nice looking images (better quality than the previous rev of Dall-e), they were even more recognizably golf course images, but still nothing truly imaginative (basically looked like fake courses of British Columbia or New Zealand).
At this point, I feel like if I want something truly cool from those prompts, I need to give them to a human artist and see what they come up with.
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This topic is interesting for what it represents at the macro level for humanity. I’m not sure if we (humans) are appropriately grappling with the question at hand: what do you want in life?
Advancement always has innovators, early adopters, mainstream, and curmudgeons. Having an innovator or early adopter tell me that the new thing is the better thing is boring. Someone explain to me not how something is better. Tell me why I should care if it’s better. Optimization is so…dull.
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Tell me why I should care if it’s better.
Agree. In fact I'm not even sure that better is even the question. Just faster and cheaper.
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This topic is interesting for what it represents at the macro level for humanity. I’m not sure if we (humans) are appropriately grappling with the question at hand: what do you want in life?
Advancement always has innovators, early adopters, mainstream, and curmudgeons. Having an innovator or early adopter tell me that the new thing is the better thing is boring. Someone explain to me not how something is better. Tell me why I should care if it’s better. Optimization is so…dull.
Nothing is better for everyone. Uber is better only for the riders (and if you've ever had the misfortunate to get in a Boston Cab you know that's true) The service is not designed for people who drive you around.... who are simply necessary due to the fact autonomous self-driving vehicles have not been perfected as yet.
In this instance, it mainly benefits the course developer. It only benefits the golfer once two other things happen:
1. Cost savings are passed onto the consumer. ie. People who play the course
2. It provides a demonstrably superior product (more design options, better design outcomes) than the current approach to building courses.
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I quit Instagram after two days because I hated my algorithm. I don’t think I would enjoy a golf course based on what I saw.
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I quit Instagram after two days because I hated my algorithm. I don’t think I would enjoy a golf course based on what I saw.
Exactly, these deep learning models or algorithms are only as good as what they're learning from.
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What a grim prospect.
There's a guy on Twitter that has built some of the most beautiful holes you've ever seen. He used a number of courses in the UK and added a California vibe.
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There's a guy on Twitter that has built some of the most beautiful holes you've ever seen. He used a number of courses in the UK and added a California vibe.
Actually "built" ? Or just rendered? There is a big difference where I come from.
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This topic is interesting for what it represents at the macro level for humanity. I’m not sure if we (humans) are appropriately grappling with the question at hand: what do you want in life?
Advancement always has innovators, early adopters, mainstream, and curmudgeons. Having an innovator or early adopter tell me that the new thing is the better thing is boring. Someone explain to me not how something is better. Tell me why I should care if it’s better. Optimization is so…dull.
I think I have mentioned here before that my wife was an art major. Before I met her -- which was just before I built Pacific Dunes, coincidence or not -- I had little or no contact with the art world and rarely thought about my business in terms of "art". Luckily, now, we have a few friends in the local art community, and a couple of them are golfers, so they are very interested in what I do at an artistic level, and it has led to lots of interesting conversations.
Just last night over dinner my wife and I were discussing Picasso and she said that she [paraphrasing] "was okay with his cubist period because he had proven his abilities with conventional forms beforehand". I objected to this as snobbish, asking what difference it made to the observer of the art whether the artist was truly talented or just lucky? But Jennifer has had classes in philosophy of art, unlike myself, and for her it was not even an argument that true art could only occur through the conscious application of observation and talent. An artist "getting lucky" and producing something cool was not REAL art.
She would say the same for AI. Maybe it will produce a great course, but does it really KNOW what it's doing? What's the next one going to be like? More likely it will just look for good spots to place C. B. Macdonald's templates, and there will be long green to tee walks!
But seriously, you could program it to recognize good spots for 1,000 of the best golf holes on earth and insist that it keep the green to tee walks tidy and move earth if necessary to achieve that . . . but that would not be the same thing as what Bill Coore does, or what I do. You would be unlikely to get anything that was truly original. Maybe it would be more efficient than the average designer's work, but I had a good guffaw at Anthony's idea that the cost savings would be passed on to the consumer. That's not how the world works.
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Anthony didn't say cost savings would be passed to the consumer. He said AI could benefit the consumer if cost are savings are passed on.
This topic is a bit like what has happened to recorded music over the years. We have gone from live studio recordings to eventually guys pressing program buttons and no musicians at all. I won't say which is better, but each can have their place. As Tom suggests, knocking out the trained, skilled and experienced professionals will eventually lead to less original work even if only a small percentage of the pros are capable of producing original work.
Ciao
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What a grim prospect.
There's a guy on Twitter that has built some of the most beautiful holes you've ever seen. He used a number of courses in the UK and added a California vibe.
I guess that's alright for wall-hangings or iPhone wallpaper, but part of what makes golf courses engaging is that they are an opportunity to interact with the people who created them, through the medium of "golf course."
This is true of any art form, by the way. I think that part of why, say, Guernica makes an impact on us is that in addition to responding to the forms of the artwork itself, we're also marveling at the human volition that created it. It's a way to connect to other people across distances and time.
I understand that people have to input prompts in order to have AI programs generate whatever they generate, but there's an inescapable deadness about the output because we are aware of its origin. The idea of promoting that deadness to the point of replacing the human volition aspect of art - golf courses, paintings, writing, whatever - is why I used the word "grim" in my post.
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I quit Instagram after two days because I hated my algorithm. I don’t think I would enjoy a golf course based on what I saw.
Exactly, these deep learning models or algorithms are only as good as what they're learning from.
I thought I was the only one...
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Curmudgeon alert.
One of my quibbles with modern(high end) architecture is the unwillingness to have an awkward hole or even an awkward length yardage hole.
If a routing or spacing dilemna pops up, untold amounts of earth are moved to create "visibility", fairness,appropriate scale etc. etc.
It seems whenever I go back to a classic course, my favorite holes are tweaked because they were "too severe" "too blind","too steep", or "too quirky", and then holes/terrain like this rarely get left alone on newer courses for all of the above reasons, combined with modern turf speed.
IMHO, we've just about jumped the shark on "finding"(and then leaving then terrain mostly as we found it) a golf course anymore, unless it's an extraordinary site like Sand Hills etc.
There's just so little tolerance for what might be perveived as a weak or awkward hole within a routing of otherwise great holes.
(see Palmetto #15 discussion of a few weeks ago)
Not saying an architect isn't allowed to make/find every hole as good as he can, but as Ben says,"Optimization is so dull....",
especially when it comes at the expense of the natural and unique land that formerly lay there.
Minimalism has certainly become a moving target/definition on my lifetime.
I can't even imagine what AI would do with all that-especially with an original desaign
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It seems whenever I go back to a classic course, my favorite holes are tweaked because they were "too severe" "too blind","too steep", or "too quirky", and then holes/terrain like this rarely get left alone on newer courses for all of the above reasons, combined with modern turf speed.
Can you cite a couple of examples of this kind of work on older courses?
I agree with your general point. Part of the problem is that I am getting paid a lot more money than I used to, with the expectation of making everything I touch a top-100 layout. I do have a couple of clients right now [out of eight!] that have said they don't care about the top 100, they just want something cool, so I will try to remember your advice when it comes to those projects.
P.S. You will definitely enjoy the 8th hole on the new course at Pinehurst. We did do some work to it, but we also left a lot of stuff in the fairway that we would normally take out! The 14th hole is pretty wild as well.
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How many original designs are still in place? Cypress Point, Sand Hills, guessing quite a few in UK but not many in US.
AI would be learning from original designs or the modified/updated designs?
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There will always be a market for the imperfect.
Be it houses, furniture, music, or golf courses.
The better we get the worse it looks sometimes.
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It seems whenever I go back to a classic course, my favorite holes are tweaked because they were "too severe" "too blind","too steep", or "too quirky", and then holes/terrain like this rarely get left alone on newer courses for all of the above reasons, combined with modern turf speed.
Can you cite a couple of examples of this kind of work on older courses?
I agree with your general point. Part of the problem is that I am getting paid a lot more money than I used to, with the expectation of making everything I touch a top-100 layout. I do have a couple of clients right now [out of eight!] that have said they don't care about the top 100, they just want something cool, so I will try to remember your advice when it comes to those projects.
P.S. You will definitely enjoy the 8th hole on the new course at Pinehurst. We did do some work to it, but we also left a lot of stuff in the fairway that we would normally take out! The 14th hole is pretty wild as well.
Tom,
Are you saying a new course cannot be top 100 or so if it has some quirk? Ballybunion, Lahinch, NB all safely in Top 100. Is there a different standard for new courses?
Thanks.
Ira
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It seems whenever I go back to a classic course, my favorite holes are tweaked because they were "too severe" "too blind","too steep", or "too quirky", and then holes/terrain like this rarely get left alone on newer courses for all of the above reasons, combined with modern turf speed.
Can you cite a couple of examples of this kind of work on older courses?
I agree with your general point. Part of the problem is that I am getting paid a lot more money than I used to, with the expectation of making everything I touch a top-100 layout. I do have a couple of clients right now [out of eight!] that have said they don't care about the top 100, they just want something cool, so I will try to remember your advice when it comes to those projects.
P.S. You will definitely enjoy the 8th hole on the new course at Pinehurst. We did do some work to it, but we also left a lot of stuff in the fairway that we would normally take out! The 14th hole is pretty wild as well.
Augusta CC-Sidehill lie of 17 altered,(modern turf problem)16th punchbowl removed ,multiple others shrunk and slope softened
Palmetto-upcoming work on 5 and 12 green-will be shocked(hopeful) if thats all that gets done..
Adding of tiers rather than tilt/slopes on hundreds of courses.
Pretty sure some work was done to some greens (11,16)at your LI North Shore recently but the greens in general remain super cool overall.
Nice to hear re:Pinehurst .Go Angela!
I'm pretty sure there's no future in following "advice" from me
Maybe we'd all be better off if the Top 100 went to Top 1000 without any ordered numbering.
Strike that.
No maybe involved.
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Augusta CC removed the punch bowl green?
It was still there when I last played the course, but that was over a decade ago. I'll probably play it again in the next couple of years, so it will be interesting to see how different everything is between changes like that and the sale to ANGC.
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Are you saying a new course cannot be top 100 or so if it has some quirk? Ballybunion, Lahinch, NB all safely in Top 100. Is there a different standard for new courses?
Ira:
I would say there is a different standard for new courses.
Part of it is client-imposed. A client this week said he wanted the greens "to run consistently at 12, sometimes faster," which eliminates a lot of potential quirkiness on the greens. Yes, some of the older courses in the top 100 still have that quirk, and they are forgiven for it, but a new course doesn't have the defense that we never imagined the greens could get that fast.
Likewise, heavily sloped fairways . . . as Jeff notes, those slopes nowadays mean a ball won't stay in the fairway and everything will roll in the rough. On an old course, that's stupid maintenance . . . on a new course, it's bad design. :D
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Tom,
Thanks for response. All three of my examples come from UK&I (and there are more). Do you think a new course there would receive more tolerance for quirk? Kingsbarns and Castle Stuart really have none. Waterville has some. I have not played St. Patrick's.
Ira
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This is clearly the best discussion we’ve had in some time. Very excited.
OF COURSE there’s a different standard for new courses. The overhead for innovation and newness is so steep that things have to be good day one. Artificial Intelligence has the ability to scour and combine in a way that even AI’s first shot at something is pretty high level these days. Imperfection is designed out of the product for fear of being imperfect. But AI can’t compete with true creativity…
Old Barnwell had a Little Lido competition where kids got to design a hole to go on the Kids Course. Brian and Blake chose a winner. Without divulging too much, the winner has a ramp and a penguin involved. Suck on that AI.
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She would say the same for AI. Maybe it will produce a great course, but does it really KNOW what it's doing? What's the next one going to be like? More likely it will just look for good spots to place C. B. Macdonald's templates, and there will be long green to tee walks!
I think your wife is generally correct. In some ways it’s like a new golfer hitting a great shot and someone in the group has to say, “you have no idea how good that is.”
Appreciation of art, for me, has as much to do with the artist as the art itself. I guess that’s what beard pulling is, but I don’t mind so much. One is the cool aspects of being friends with someone that knows so much about music is when I say I like a song, they provide color, background, and context. It makes the music even better to me.
An aside, I’m enjoying the little tiny swipes at templates every now and then. Very funny.
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Are you saying a new course cannot be top 100 or so if it has some quirk? Ballybunion, Lahinch, NB all safely in Top 100. Is there a different standard for new courses?
Ira:
I would say there is a different standard for new courses.
Part of it is client-imposed. A client this week said he wanted the greens "to run consistently at 12, sometimes faster," which eliminates a lot of potential quirkiness on the greens. Yes, some of the older courses in the top 100 still have that quirk, and they are forgiven for it, but a new course doesn't have the defense that we never imagined the greens could get that fast.
Likewise, heavily sloped fairways . . . as Jeff notes, those slopes nowadays mean a ball won't stay in the fairway and everything will roll in the rough. On an old course, that's stupid maintenance . . . on a new course, it's bad design. :D
AI could also perform a soil analysis and tell you what grass strains were best for the course you designed... As the outputs from AI get more finely grained, it could also suggest maintenance protocols for expected traffic levels, weather patterns, upcoming elite tournaments etc.
In essence, I believe the best outcome for Artificial Intelligence when comes to Golf Course Design and Maintenance would be similar to the initial purpose for IBM Watson - ingesting huge amounts of data in whatever field the user was involved in and provide recommendations on cancer treatments, marketing spend or an infinite number of other topics.
The issue at this point is that many of the 'assets' of golf course design - routing maps, environmental mitigation plans, permitting documents, build budgets - are stored in the offices of about 200+ architecture firms around the world and thus too scattered and too paper-based to form enough of a data lake for people to have confidence in whatever recommendations are made. An industry has to be digital at its core for AI or indeed any algorithm to have a sizeable impact...
Some of the demos we had at Watson Health were fairly mind-blowing in terms of the potential they demonstrated but it never quite made it out of prototype due to the sad state of Medical Data and the various d____s who were running that division.
I can see a time in about 20 years where people who use technology will sell digital design services to the property developers and the people with notable industry experience stick to the usual ways of doing things. The smart ones will figure out a way to incorporate digital capabilities into their design/builds to reduce the shorten the construction timeline and thus the delivered price of the golf course.
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Old Barnwell had a Little Lido competition where kids got to design a hole to go on the Kids Course. Brian and Blake chose a winner. Without divulging too much, the winner has a ramp and a penguin involved. Suck on that AI.
The hole was named "Madagascar" I assume...
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Old Barnwell had a Little Lido competition where kids got to design a hole to go on the Kids Course. Brian and Blake chose a winner. Without divulging too much, the winner has a ramp and a penguin involved. Suck on that AI.
In college, my landscape architecture classmates decided to have a golf hole design competition one evening, and asked me to judge. The winning entry had an island green with no bridge . . . and a tiger chained to the flagstick. [And that was just before the TPC at Sawgrass.]
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AI could also perform a soil analysis and tell you what grass strains were best for the course you designed... As the outputs from AI get more finely grained, it could also suggest maintenance protocols for expected traffic levels, weather patterns, upcoming elite tournaments etc.
In essence, I believe the best outcome for Artificial Intelligence when comes to Golf Course Design and Maintenance would be similar to the initial purpose for IBM Watson - ingesting huge amounts of data in whatever field the user was involved in and provide recommendations on cancer treatments, marketing spend or an infinite number of other topics.
The issue at this point is that many of the 'assets' of golf course design - routing maps, environmental mitigation plans, permitting documents, build budgets - are stored in the offices of about 200+ architecture firms around the world and thus too scattered and too paper-based to form enough of a data lake for people to have confidence in whatever recommendations are made. An industry has to be digital at its core for AI or indeed any algorithm to have a sizeable impact...
Some of the demos we had at Watson Health were fairly mind-blowing in terms of the potential they demonstrated but it never quite made it out of prototype due to the sad state of Medical Data and the various d____s who were running that division.
I can see a time in about 20 years where people who use technology will sell digital design services to the property developers and the people with notable industry experience stick to the usual ways of doing things. The smart ones will figure out a way to incorporate digital capabilities into their design/builds to reduce the shorten the construction timeline and thus the delivered price of the golf course.
You mentioned the OCM proposal for Medinah . . . the flip side of that is that when they interviewed for a job with Michael Keiser, he wanted them to come out and walk the ground with him and talk through golf holes, and they wanted to get back to the computer to work on the plan that way. So it can also be a great way to lose a job, I guess.
All of my designs are on paper in some form or another, but they are also in much greater detail in LIDAR on various county web sites, as are all the other great golf courses in the world. It's a treasure trove for a real student of design.
But somebody has to tell the AI what to do with it all, and that's where I think things would get lost in translation. In Mike Hurdzan's book he had a case study of how he would do a routing . . . the process followed mine until he got to step 8 or something, which insisted that grades in the fairways be 4% or less, so then he bulldozed all the fairways on a piece of ground that looked pretty good to me! AI is like every other computer thing ever . . . Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Most importantly, though . . . WHY in the world do you want to turn everything over to Artificial Intelligence? Will you not be happy until every cool job is usurped by AI and we all have to work as slaves to provide power for the machines? It's not like the machines are going to give us all money so we can enjoy golf at our leisure.
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What would be worse...using AI to design a course or being so predictable in your actual work that everyone assumes you used AI?
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I don't think its a matter of people want to turn over stuff to AI, in most cases most people probably want the opposite.
But from the perspective of the person who is cutting the checks, its a different story. So whether we like it or not, tools like ChatGPT are going to put a lot of people out of work...
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I don't think its a matter of people want to turn over stuff to AI, in most cases most people probably want the opposite.
But from the perspective of the person who is cutting the checks, its a different story. So whether we like it or not, tools like ChatGPT are going to put a lot of people out of work...
It makes me wonder who companies think they're going to sell their products/services to if everyone is out of work.
Honestly, I have more faith in some future artificial general intelligence (which the current large language models are definitely not) than I do in a lot of the current business folks.
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I don't think its a matter of people want to turn over stuff to AI, in most cases most people probably want the opposite.
But from the perspective of the person who is cutting the checks, its a different story. So whether we like it or not, tools like ChatGPT are going to put a lot of people out of work...
It makes me wonder who companies think they're going to sell their products/services to if everyone is out of work.
Honestly, I have more faith in some future artificial general intelligence (which the current large language models are definitely not) than I do in a lot of the current business folks.
It'll be interesting to see which industries are affected the most. Golf Architecture & Building seems fairly limited compared to others like Education/Academia, Tech Companies, Law Firms, etc. which could see massive reductions
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I don't think its a matter of people want to turn over stuff to AI, in most cases most people probably want the opposite.
But from the perspective of the person who is cutting the checks, its a different story. So whether we like it or not, tools like ChatGPT are going to put a lot of people out of work...
It makes me wonder who companies think they're going to sell their products/services to if everyone is out of work.
Honestly, I have more faith in some future artificial general intelligence (which the current large language models are definitely not) than I do in a lot of the current business folks.
It'll be interesting to see which industries are affected the most. Golf Architecture & Building seems fairly limited compared to others like Education/Academia, Tech Companies, Law Firms, etc. which could see massive reductions
It will be interesting, but I think the threat from tools derived from the current iteration of programs out there is greatly overblown. I think we're reading so much about it because it is so concentrated on creative areas and journalists feel a little threatened by it and they're the ones who write the stories or make the videos that we all consume.
But again, even if a lot of people can be replaced, without a stronger social safety net, who is going to buy burgers, pickup trucks, phones etc?
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So, in my byline below I have the phrase "I think golf culture should be more like beer culture than wine culture" and I think this conversation is illustrative of what I mean by that.
I moved to in Northern CA about a decade ago, and my girlfriend is from Sonoma County. There is a bit of culture clash between Napa and Sonoma which, I think, is relevant to the golf world. Napa is home to some of the most artisan wines in the world, and much of the region is set up to sell people on that experience. The idea is that someone in an expensive suit tells you that you are drinking the best wine, it's won these awards, this is why it matters, and you're in a beautiful setting that's appropriate for this exclusive experience. And, without question, the wine they're selling you is indeed amazing.
Sonoma County also makes some of the best wines in the world, but ironically, they're much more known for their beer. Russian River Brewing, Lagunitas Brewing, Bear Republic, Moonlight... etc. The clash in culture couldn't be more evident. Even the esteemed Russian River eschews any sense of that marketing-as-product you get in Napa. Their tasting room is a bar in downtown Santa Rosa, that has regulars, and basic pub food and pizza. The same culture clash exists in their wine industry too, where the best wine I've ever tasted was in a warehouse in a parking lot, made by the same wine makers that made the high-end wine on a vineyard for a fancy members-only winery.
What does this have to do with golf culture? There will always be an audience for "the best" golf courses. The napa-style best course, made by the best people, in the best setting, which you're paying top dollar for... if you're even allowed to access it. It will always exist because the gatekeepers and exclusivity are almost necessary to justify the experience of greatness many people are seeking. The bona fides are necessary for the product.
What does this have to do with ML in golf course development? I've studied a bit of Machine Learning (which is a term i much prefer to the nebulous "AI"), and so I have a fairly elementary, but educated view of how many of these algos work (I've even tried my hand at a couple automatic golf hole mapping U-net algorithms and failed miserably). Machine Learning is nothing more than a tool that educated people can use to help them complete a task. Could it make it easier for use to develop a golf course? Sure, in theory, but I'm very skeptical at this point, but let's assume I'm wrong about that...
If this comes to pass, that "AI" will make golf course development trivially easy. Then developing a golf course will actually became achievable for much, much less wealthy individuals. Much like how you can trivially brew a batch of beer for pennies in your cellar without being able to buy a plot of land in wine country, I would hope the use of ML could make the backyard par 3 an achievable goal for folks with a cottage in the country. And the few folks that excel at that could even go on to become famous designers much like the folks in Sonoma County with their (at the time) highly experimental/avant garde beers.
The idea that we need to protect the golf course architecture cannon from AI just seems so backwards to me. The idea that we can go from a world in which only the educated (and obviously very talented) few can try their hand at golf course design (your Budweisers, Coors, Millers, and dare I say Jones's), to a world where you could have a couple of extremely popular architects in every metro area seems like a huge win for golf culture (and more importantly, pace of play ;) )
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Then developing a golf course will actually became achievable for much, much less wealthy individuals.
I feel like this would be the case if designing the course was the expensive part. I just don't think it's enough to make a huge difference. Someone with more recent knowledge can answer, is design generally more than say 10% of the cost? To say nothing of ongoing maintenance and operations.
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I think ML will much sooner bring us a "here's how to build/grow a backyard par 3 in this region, with this soil, in 25 easy steps" before it brings us the thoughtful nuance of architecture. We're not talking about stimping 14 daily with the toro, we're talking about getting something workable in the ground with basic maintenance.
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I don’t see AI as replacing the talent/art form of golf course architecture as we know it. That said I don’t see how it is a negative as a tool to aid the designer and or construction team.
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It’s a crutch not a tool.
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It’s a crutch not a tool.
Technically speaking, a crutch is a type of tool...
Anyway, yes, especially Dall-e seems to be a bit of a crutch to produce art that allows people not so inclined or blessed to produce works they wouldn't otherwise be able to. I'm still not sure that it's that big of a problem. Earlier in the thread I mentioned being underwhelmed with what was generated by my prompt "golf course at the end of the world". The results were fine/meh. I know I'd get something way more interesting if I gave Tommy N. the prompt and proper pay. It's not even close at this point.
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Machine Learning is nothing more than a tool that educated people can use to help them complete a task.
Matt,
This is the key factor as I see it.
In my area of expertise with development teams of various types (software, hardware, patching, etc), you have people who aren't the decision makers and basically do the grunt work. So say a project team of 10 (6 devs and 4 testers) could be plausibly reduced by 3 or 4. Extrapolate this across an entire industry and its millions of jobs that vanish in many cases in the short term. And that's just one field....throw in others as mentioned above and we could easily run into the 10s of millions.
Then factor in this current form of AI is still in relative infancy. ChatGPT is already very effective and its still in BETA. Its going to get even better and useful by leaps and bounds in a very short time frame, and employers will continue to adapt and find even more ways to use it save costs...
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I expect AI to more about raising the floor for less talented people, than raising the bar for the most talented.
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News flash: We will make it to 2040 and still be able to play outdoors. Crisis averted.
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I have given this a couple of days of thought.
First, let's all admit there is an ENORMOUS amount of hype around AI right now . . . story after story in every kind of media about how it is going to change every aspect of life. Why all the stories? Because a few Silicon Valley companies are trying to cash in on the hype and ramp their valuations to the moon. They want to live in those mansions NOW, not in ten years IF the technology proves itself.
Will AI have that kind of effect? In some businesses, maybe yes; in others, no. Remember all the hype around self driving cars? Well, artificial intelligence and enormous investment still haven't produced a self driving car that is reliable enough to deliver on those promises. (Time to change the subject . . . and they are very glad they didn't label that "AI driving".]
For golf course design - or art - AI is more likely to succeed, because success is mostly subjective -- nobody is going to crash and die -- and only a small percentage of the users know the difference between really good work and schlock.
But, AI is not going to make it cost a lot less to build a golf course. You might cut out one or two people in the architect's office, and you might cut out the best shapers in favor of guys sitting on a computer . . . in the same way that drone warfare has cut out some pilots, but hasn't seemed to lower our defense budget. And if you believe that a guy sitting in his basement on a computer, or the computer itself, is going to produce BETTER work than a guy sitting on a machine at the site of a future golf hole, well, then maybe AI will take over golf course design. But only because of my previous paragraph.
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Golf course maintenance is what I thought would be coming, not golf course design. Lots of possibilities there in terms of a dwindling labor pool, cost savings, etc.
Golf Course Design? Why would someone even bother with the hassle? Seems if someone did want to construct (and finance) such folly, it would just be to show people it could be done. It would be a gimmick.
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After seeing a number of quite questionable "restorations" of golden age courses, I'm wondering how AI would define what a "golf course restoration" is? How it is different from a redesign? What "original design intent" is? If what they have to work from is the claims of architects and golf clubs after their work was completed, it will be quite interesting to see how badly they can "miss the boat" while convincing a client that they are an expert in a specific architects work...
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;D Well, the HAL 9000 final experience portrayed in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
HAL: I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I’ve still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you. Dave, stop it. Stop, will you? Stop Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop Dave. I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.
Dave the human knows the plug has to be pulled ... would be nice if we could do the same with the AI hype. After all, who's going to hook up the tow line to get the shaper pulled out of the mud?
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AI could potentially be used in the design process of a golf course, but it would likely require significant input and guidance from human experts in the field.
For example, an AI system could be trained on a large dataset of existing golf courses and their features, such as the length and layout of holes, the placement of hazards, and the overall course design. It could then generate new course designs based on that data and the specific parameters provided by human experts, such as the desired level of difficulty, the available terrain, and the surrounding environment.
However, designing a good golf course involves more than just technical specifications and data analysis. It also requires an understanding of the sport of golf itself, the preferences and expectations of golfers, and the aesthetics and natural beauty of the surrounding landscape. These are areas where human expertise and creativity are likely to be more important than AI algorithms.
Therefore, while AI could certainly play a role in the design process, it would need to be combined with the knowledge and experience of human designers and golf experts to create a truly outstanding golf course.
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The above was answer from ChatGBT to query whether AI could design a good course. At least it is “smart” enough to hide its intentions to take over the world.
Ira
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The above was answer from ChatGBT to query whether AI could design a good course. At least it is “smart” enough to hide its intentions to take over the world.
I found that especially funny because I have heard the same non-denial denials from several people who later wound up hanging out a shingle as designers or design consultants. :D
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This topic is interesting for what it represents at the macro level for humanity. I’m not sure if we (humans) are appropriately grappling with the question at hand: what do you want in life?
Advancement always has innovators, early adopters, mainstream, and curmudgeons. Having an innovator or early adopter tell me that the new thing is the better thing is boring. Someone explain to me not how something is better. Tell me why I should care if it’s better. Optimization is so…dull.
I think I have mentioned here before that my wife was an art major. Before I met her -- which was just before I built Pacific Dunes, coincidence or not -- I had little or no contact with the art world and rarely thought about my business in terms of "art". Luckily, now, we have a few friends in the local art community, and a couple of them are golfers, so they are very interested in what I do at an artistic level, and it has led to lots of interesting conversations.
Just last night over dinner my wife and I were discussing Picasso and she said that she [paraphrasing] "was okay with his cubist period because he had proven his abilities with conventional forms beforehand". I objected to this as snobbish, asking what difference it made to the observer of the art whether the artist was truly talented or just lucky? But Jennifer has had classes in philosophy of art, unlike myself, and for her it was not even an argument that true art could only occur through the conscious application of observation and talent. An artist "getting lucky" and producing something cool was not REAL art.
She would say the same for AI. Maybe it will produce a great course, but does it really KNOW what it's doing? What's the next one going to be like? More likely it will just look for good spots to place C. B. Macdonald's templates, and there will be long green to tee walks!
But seriously, you could program it to recognize good spots for 1,000 of the best golf holes on earth and insist that it keep the green to tee walks tidy and move earth if necessary to achieve that . . . but that would not be the same thing as what Bill Coore does, or what I do. You would be unlikely to get anything that was truly original. Maybe it would be more efficient than the average designer's work, but I had a good guffaw at Anthony's idea that the cost savings would be passed on to the consumer. That's not how the world works.
Tom:
I disagree with your wife. I'm an artist too and I hate Picasso, I think his body of work is ugly. I think the same thing of Basquait. I think great artists tell a story and I prefer a beautiful one. Golf course design is art and great design should be very eye appealing as well as challenging but not penal, because penal is never beautiful.
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Cary,
I certainly agree with your first bit, ART is soooo subjective, its seems a bit of folly to say what is and isn't "real" art.
However as to your 2nd part, Oakmont and Pine Valley are often described as very penal and they can easily eat top players proverbial lunches, but from the countless pics and video I've seen they both look amazing beautiful.
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I think we're missing the point a little bit on Tom's post. It's about intentionality. Picasso was a talented and skilled enough artist to have done whatever he set out to do. His cubist period was as intentional as his earliest work. That skill and intentionality is a part of the art. The fact that my kindergartener could have done it is a non sequitur. My kindergartener had no skill or intentionality.
An algorithm also has no intentionality. I feel like the best that can come from an algorithm is artwork, not art. And that's fine, in my life, what I produce is really artwork rather than art, at least most of the time.
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I think we're missing the point a little bit on Tom's post. It's about intentionality. Picasso was a talented and skilled enough artist to have done whatever he set out to do. His cubist period was as intentional as his earliest work. That skill and intentionality is a part of the art. The fact that my kindergartener could have done it is a non sequitur. My kindergartener had no skill or intentionality.
Agreed - when you say Picasso was a poor artist, you lose all credibility - at least in the field of art criticism.
Picasso is like the Tom Brady of Artists.. He also had 3 Hall of Fame careers except his career lasted 70 years not 23..
1.Blue/Rose Period.
2. Cubism > Guernica.
3. Post WW II
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I have given this a couple of days of thought.
First, let's all admit there is an ENORMOUS amount of hype around AI right now . . . story after story in every kind of media about how it is going to change every aspect of life. Why all the stories? Because a few Silicon Valley companies are trying to cash in on the hype and ramp their valuations to the moon. They want to live in those mansions NOW, not in ten years IF the technology proves itself.
Will AI have that kind of effect? In some businesses, maybe yes; in others, no. Remember all the hype around self driving cars? Well, artificial intelligence and enormous investment still haven't produced a self driving car that is reliable enough to deliver on those promises. (Time to change the subject . . . and they are very glad they didn't label that "AI driving".]
For golf course design - or art - AI is more likely to succeed, because success is mostly subjective -- nobody is going to crash and die -- and only a small percentage of the users know the difference between really good work and schlock.
But, AI is not going to make it cost a lot less to build a golf course. You might cut out one or two people in the architect's office, and you might cut out the best shapers in favor of guys sitting on a computer . . . in the same way that drone warfare has cut out some pilots, but hasn't seemed to lower our defense budget. And if you believe that a guy sitting in his basement on a computer, or the computer itself, is going to produce BETTER work than a guy sitting on a machine at the site of a future golf hole, well, then maybe AI will take over golf course design. But only because of my previous paragraph.
Significant cost savings may only be realized when the entire course delivery chain is both digitized and ML-Enabled. So AI would design or "assist' in the design of the course. The final approved layout and routing would then programmed into GPS connected machinery that would shape the holes (and eventually the green sites).
That technology already exists on farm machinery. As you mentioned Tom, even if these vehicles are unmanned or 'self-driving' the risks are much lower than allowing Musk-built vehicles to terrorize our nation's highways and kill the occupants and innocent bystanders.
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Anthony,
I think the biggest obstacle to self-driving cars is humanity itself. All of the data we have on them so far shows that they get in accidents at far lower rates than people do. But all it takes is one bad wreck by a self-driving vehicle to declare they all must be shut off, imagine if same standard were held for human drivers.
P.S. When/if AI robots or equivalent were running the show in the dystopian future, based on metrics in the aggregate one thing would be certain, humans would never be allowed to get behind the wheel.
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I just got started reading The Culture novels by Iain M. Banks (80% of the way through the first book, Consider Phlebas). I'm not making any pronouncements about quality etc., but I'm fascinated to be reading a non-dystopian sci-fi book about AI. Most of what we see in media about the far-future of AI is it deciding it doesn't need us and tries to eliminate us. This book considers the possibility that it wouldn't go down like that. In the book, the societies outside of the AI-led Culture think humans are basically pets, inside the Culture society it's a little more complicated than that. If you like sci-fi, it may be something someone would be interested in. (I'm not a big sci-fi reader FYI)
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Anthony,
I think the biggest obstacle to self-driving cars is humanity itself. All of the data we have on them so far shows that they get in accidents at far lower rates than people do. But all it takes is one bad wreck by a self-driving vehicle to declare they all must be shut off, imagine if same standard were held for human drivers.
P.S. When/if AI robots or equivalent were running the show in the dystopian future, based on metrics in the aggregate one thing would be certain, humans would never be allowed to get behind the wheel.
Yes, self-driving car accidents are the new shark attacks in terms of headline-grabbing events.
That doesn't change the fact Elon Musk is still an a__hole.
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I live in SF, in a testing neighborhood for Cruise and Waymo. I've ridden in driverless Cruise vehicles more than a few times, and yet I am generally skeptical of self-driving cars' viability. I really think self-driving cars are not a useful proxy for the uses of machine learning with regards to golf course development, because our automobile-focused transportation infrastructure is inherently broken and dangerous, where society seems to care much more about uninterrupted throughput than human lives.
Automatic mowers, for example, could simply be pre-programmed, with fail safes, and wouldn't even need machine learning involved much at all. If it did have ML involved, it would be much more akin to Andrew Ng's self-driving busses (https://www.economist.com/business/2018/08/02/a-more-realistic-route-to-autonomous-driving) with preassigned routes, than general self driving cars.
Again, I think machine learning applications could assist in development of golf courses throughout all the stages. I just think it's important for folks to remember these things take time, and models are trained to do a specific task. Generalized intelligence is still wildly theoretical.
If I had a few spare million dollars, one application I've had in my head for some time, is to train a model walk through topo maps, and find a piece of land similar enough to Augusta National to create a copy for the masses to be able to play. That's the type of application I think would be useful. Another application would just be having a reasonable, if not genius, artificial agronomist to chat with.
Artistic layouts and subtle strategic thought I don't think is something we should be worried about just yet. The types of games that algo's can play are all perfect information games (Go, Chess, etc., though I've heard it played Diplomacy well, but I'm skeptical), and all the artistic creations currently offered do still lack a lot of subtleties (see: it can't draw hands) that are exactly what GCA fans are looking for. I just think it's easy to imagine a fantastical AI future, but I see a lot of speculation with regards to ML that sounds a lot like the flying cars we were promised in my youth, with no clear path from the tech that exists now to get there.
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Another application would just be having a reasonably, if not genius, artificial agronomist to chat with.
Actually, this sounds wonderful. Given the vagaries of this type of discussion on here, it can be difficult to get much for specific information from the supers on the board about maintenance or agronomy or whatnot. Being able to feed in plat information and the algorithm being able to look up soil, climate, topography and other stuff and give me a few estimates for the cost of maintenance or appropriate turf varietals etc. would be terrific. (I'm talking in considering new construction, but it might work for existing courses as well.) I understand totally the good reasons why a super might not want that type of information available. If a course's maintenance budget was above what the AI tool estimated, I could imagine a moronic member or committee using it against the super.
I don't know the answer to that sort of problem, but we probably need to start thinking about it, because it's probably not particularly far off into the future.
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Again, I think machine learning applications could assist in development of golf courses throughout all the stages. I just think it's important for folks to remember these things take time, and models are trained to do a specific task. Generalized intelligence is still wildly theoretical.
I agree with Matt’s take as instead of looking at it through the lens of nixing people and skill sets view it as “an assist in the development of golf courses.”
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My initial thoughts in this area went less to generative AI being used to develop original designs, and more to being used for restorations. For example, if you trained a model on the designs of a particular architect, could it be used to make suggestions for how a course should be restored based on that architect's tendencies?
I particularly thought about this in regards to recreating the Lido, where I think Tom & team had to make some decisions on the ground that were different than the computer model output because a particular element/feature was out of scale/out of character with how CBM would have designed it. A model that was trained on CBM designs could find these inconsistencies in a review of the course and provide suggestions for an architect to implement.
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It seems whenever I go back to a classic course, my favorite holes are tweaked because they were "too severe" "too blind","too steep", or "too quirky", and then holes/terrain like this rarely get left alone on newer courses for all of the above reasons, combined with modern turf speed.
Can you cite a couple of examples of this kind of work on older courses?
We've seen it over the years at Hoylake with the demise of Dowie and Royal and the work of Steel, Hawtree and M&E.
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This is clearly the best discussion we’ve had in some time. Very excited.
OF COURSE there’s a different standard for new courses. The overhead for innovation and newness is so steep that things have to be good day one. Artificial Intelligence has the ability to scour and combine in a way that even AI’s first shot at something is pretty high level these days. Imperfection is designed out of the product for fear of being imperfect. But AI can’t compete with true creativity…
Old Barnwell had a Little Lido competition where kids got to design a hole to go on the Kids Course. Brian and Blake chose a winner. Without divulging too much, the winner has a ramp and a penguin involved. Suck on that AI.
Ben,
I’m looking forward to the kids course. Glad Nick came up with that idea.
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This topic is interesting for what it represents at the macro level for humanity. I’m not sure if we (humans) are appropriately grappling with the question at hand: what do you want in life?
Advancement always has innovators, early adopters, mainstream, and curmudgeons. Having an innovator or early adopter tell me that the new thing is the better thing is boring. Someone explain to me not how something is better. Tell me why I should care if it’s better. Optimization is so…dull.
I think I have mentioned here before that my wife was an art major. Before I met her -- which was just before I built Pacific Dunes, coincidence or not -- I had little or no contact with the art world and rarely thought about my business in terms of "art". Luckily, now, we have a few friends in the local art community, and a couple of them are golfers, so they are very interested in what I do at an artistic level, and it has led to lots of interesting conversations.
Just last night over dinner my wife and I were discussing Picasso and she said that she [paraphrasing] "was okay with his cubist period because he had proven his abilities with conventional forms beforehand". I objected to this as snobbish, asking what difference it made to the observer of the art whether the artist was truly talented or just lucky? But Jennifer has had classes in philosophy of art, unlike myself, and for her it was not even an argument that true art could only occur through the conscious application of observation and talent. An artist "getting lucky" and producing something cool was not REAL art.
She would say the same for AI. Maybe it will produce a great course, but does it really KNOW what it's doing? What's the next one going to be like? More likely it will just look for good spots to place C. B. Macdonald's templates, and there will be long green to tee walks!
But seriously, you could program it to recognize good spots for 1,000 of the best golf holes on earth and insist that it keep the green to tee walks tidy and move earth if necessary to achieve that . . . but that would not be the same thing as what Bill Coore does, or what I do. You would be unlikely to get anything that was truly original. Maybe it would be more efficient than the average designer's work, but I had a good guffaw at Anthony's idea that the cost savings would be passed on to the consumer. That's not how the world works.
Ask your wife about Basquait's body of work, I'm curious
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It would be interesting to ask AI to blend in "quirk", given the number of great quirky holes in Ireland and Scotland.
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I'm glad to see this conversation has continued at a low boil during my one-month of self imposed Internet absence in New Hampshire. My few trips away from the Granite State all involved journeys south for various lacrosse events.. these inevitably take place somewhere in Maryland or nearby- including an overnight camp just for goalies.
I told my wife I'm happy to drive my son there, but I'm not hanging around for 8 hours in the sun to watch what is essentially practice. That allowed me to squeeze in a round last week at Bulle Rock - a Pete Dye course in Havre de Grace which I thoroughly enjoyed. Like most Dye Courses, it has a set of challenging green sites, particularly as the greens are quite small compared to the scale of the course. And, despite the fact the greens are not large, if you're not on the right section two-putting can be difficult.
I realized that in some ways what Tom Doak has done during his career is build greens on a larger scale where possible that capture the same qualities as the greens you'll find on Pete Dye's notable courses - at least the ones I've played - TPC Sawgrass, Ocean Course, TPC West, Harbour Town, Long Cove etc.
That mentor or guild relationship would not exist if AI took over the design of golf courses to a large degree... You wouldn't have designers learning their craft from their elders, then providing the public with their own take on what they've been exposed to.
I'm note sure how that applies in the art world, but if music continues down the path of sampling and artificial creation as much as other fields impacted by AI - we may never get further examples like Woody Guthrie > Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry > Rolling Stones or, more recently, the Black Keys channeling Howlin' Wolf. If a human being hasn’t learnt from the ideas and creations of all that have come before, they have no basis from
which create their own vision - and probably no skills or experience on how to make that vision reality.
That I think would be a huge loss.
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How will we know when an AI architect has been dead long enough to love?
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How will we know when an AI architect has been dead long enough to love?
John - funny comment... do you love your current laptop, or do you think your previous laptop was better?