An attack by the Golden State Warriors NBA team: Stephen Curry, probably the best thrower in basketball history, runs towards the basket without the ball and turns to the side opposite the ball. The defense follows him, a teammate moves to the basket in the gap this opens and scores for two points. This situation will not appear in the statistics for Curry so far, but such statistics do not seem to tell the whole story.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Rostock and Cornell University in Ithaca (USA) have developed a new metric that also makes Stephen Curry’s passive influence measurable and can also improve player positions. To do this, they use centimeter-precise tracking data from NBA games as well as a theoretical approach that comes directly from quantum physics.
In a quantum system with many electrons, it is generally not possible to solve an equation to break down the movement of all individual electrons and predict them at any given time – comparable to the players in a basketball game. For so-called many-body systems, you no longer look at each individual particle, but rather at the movement of the whole. You can use a density function to estimate where electrons are concentrated more on average.
That was the excerpt from our heise-Plus article “How to use quantum physics to analyze tracking data from NBA players”. With a heise Plus subscription you can read the entire article.
