Wilson Golf Fit AI

[Josh Parker]

27 minutes ago, JohnSmalls said:

You got it!  I was building a dream set the other day.  Can confirm they had lefty options in stock then

These may be clubs I switch to at some point this year.  I miss my original wilson staff deep red tour clubs.  

I love my Srixons but my ole wilson clubs were great!  

[JohnSmalls]

First 7 minutes or so give a pretty great look at the system.  Looking forward in seeing results from those of you who can try it out.  I'm going to try and do the same! 

[JohnSmalls]

1 minute ago, Josh Parker said:

These may be clubs I switch to at some point this year.  I miss my original wilson staff deep red tour clubs.  

I love my Srixons but my ole wilson clubs were great!  

I recently moved from D7s to the previous gen Staff CB,  and I love them so far.  I know Srixons have a great and well earned reputation, you can't go wrong either way! 

[tigerpill]

14 hours ago, Josh Parker said:

I have Srixon's and so many manufacturers leave us Lefties out of a lot of choices.  I wanted the Utility Iron in a 2 and they don't offer it.  Also was really interested in the Z forged II's and not available.  

I will say it has gotten a lot better over the years but still a long ways off.  The Wilson Staff MB/CB look awesome but no left handed yet.  I'm hoping that changes.

It does seem crazy that at this point in time we still get left out on some items. I had to get a Cleveland Gap Wedge because Srixon doesn't make it in LH.

[tigerpill]

13 hours ago, sellemental said:

Seems like you lefties have hijacked my thread !  TOTALLY KIDDING !!  

I'm actually a lefty also, but golf right handed.  Natural progression from baseball, and more so a two handed backhand in tennis.

I empathize with you all !

My fault! 

[tigerpill]

13 hours ago, cnosil said:

5 swings is the max you should take.  This plays out in a fitting as well;  fitters should only let you take 3 to a max of 5 swings with a club to prevent you from changing your swing to make the club work.   The Wilson fitting system; like the mizuno shaft optimizer, has you take a few swings and they measure aspects of your swing.  Those results are compared against what others were fit into to give you a starting point. Then you hit the recommendations and see of the work and feel.   One of the potential advantages is that it helps reduce the number of swings you need to take to get fit which means you are not fatigued when you get to the end of your session.   You like old fashion;  this means you have a fitter who sees you swing and gets numbers from a launch monitor or ball flight and then based on experience gives you something else to try which continues until you get to a good combination.   The Wilson system is no different except the knowledge is stored in a larger more comprehensive database and not in someone's head so you get to the good combinations faster. 

Thanks, makes sense. Just something I need to try and see how it goes. I'm sure the confidence will change if it's a great experience. It certainly makes sense with the incredible amount of data that is available now with trackman, arccos and the like. 

[billpierce]

16 hours ago, cnosil said:

I would assume that if covers stock and upcharge shafts that you can order from either Wilson or Mizuno.  Wilson and Mizuno don't make shafts so yes it is brand agnostic.   I don't know how many shafts the Wilson recommends but the Mizuno system gives you three recommendations.  Also,  if you are using a fitter,  they should be able to recommend other shafts that match the profile of the recommendations if you are against the recommendation. 

I heard this is the value of a club champion type fitting versus what I had at Golftec who stick to the manufacturer options mostly. Never have observed or used Club Champion but there is one in Portsmouth NH I have my eye on!

[HikingMike]

21 hours ago, tigerpill said:

I guess I was thinking 5 swings wasn't enough, but maybe with the 10s of 1000s of swings they have collected the AI is pretty good. I wouldn't rule out trying it. I am somewhat old fashion in my thinking. Want to see it fly and have someone tweaking things for me. 

18 hours ago, cnosil said:

5 swings is the max you should take.  This plays out in a fitting as well;  fitters should only let you take 3 to a max of 5 swings with a club to prevent you from changing your swing to make the club work.   The Wilson fitting system; like the mizuno shaft optimizer, has you take a few swings and they measure aspects of your swing.  Those results are compared against what others were fit into to give you a starting point. Then you hit the recommendations and see of the work and feel.   One of the potential advantages is that it helps reduce the number of swings you need to take to get fit which means you are not fatigued when you get to the end of your session.   You like old fashion;  this means you have a fitter who sees you swing and gets numbers from a launch monitor or ball flight and then based on experience gives you something else to try which continues until you get to a good combination.   The Wilson system is no different except the knowledge is stored in a larger more comprehensive database and not in someone's head so you get to the good combinations faster. 

Awesome. This does make a lot of sense.

I was going to add, with the AI system, it really would only need just a single prototypical swing from you to make its recommendations. It's making a decision based on that and the big data of zillions of swings from other people (and their ideal solutions) that the AI has been trained on. But of course we don't make the exact same swing each time so 5 swings sounds good to average out a prototypical swing for us.

Lots of advantages there. Of course I wonder how they trained the system on those zillions of swings. They had to tell it what were the best recommendations of shaft for each of those, or at least verify the choices, so they could get the system cranking out optimal recommendations for someone's newly tested swing. I'm really curious how they did that. Did they have actual human fitters making choices of recommendations based on the data for these? Did they actually have the people try all or a lot of the shafts and check distance/dispersion/etc. to be purely data all the way? Was it something in-between? This would have been great for MGS/John Barba to ask Wilson. Maybe it's just interesting to me as a computer guy, but it definitely has implications on the results.

From the article, it sounds like the system is learning as they go as well. That would imply they are using the fitting results from a new fitting session to feed back into training the AI what the optimal results should be. That definitely sounds possible since they are using a mobile app and they are probably saving the results in there. That's cool that's it's still being trained, and I know it will have updates one way or another as time goes by. But they will want only good data to be fed into the system for it's decision making, so there is a lot riding on the decisions of those fitters. If they have a bunch of fitters with certain preconceptions that are actually counterproductive, and give shaft results based on those, and those are fed back into the AI, then that could potentially cause the AI's decisions to be skewed to a degree as well. However, a large enough amount of data flow and mostly good fittings could cause that to not be a concern at all.

Edited March 6 by HikingMike

[JohnSmalls]

One more video for your viewing pleasure. This one gives a little more insight as compared to the first video plus it has our old HQ Spy Harry running Paddy through the Fit AI system.

[cnosil]

1 hour ago, HikingMike said:

Of course I wonder how they trained the system on those zillions of swings. They had to tell it what were the best recommendations of shaft for each of those, or at least verify the choices, so they could get the system cranking out optimal recommendations for someone's newly tested swing. I'm really curious how they did that. 

If it is truly AI,  they had a training set of data that they fed into the system that contained the data values and results.   They then imported swing data to validate that the system picked the right results based on predetermined answers.   The AI system will validate how accurate the algorithm is and identify where it has made incorrect selections.  

[billpierce]

5 minutes ago, cnosil said:

If it is truly AI,  they had a training set of data that they fed into the system that contained the data values and results.   They then imported swing data to validate that the system picked the right results based on predetermined answers.   The AI system will validate how accurate the algorithm is and identify where it has made incorrect selections.  

It’s only as good as :

1 the platform it’s built off azure? Open ai?  Google?

2 the quality of the data it was trained on

3 the bias of the code jockeys

4 the math used to filter or catch bias and or outliers 

5 the rules engine and pattern alignment process such as a covairance matrix and ML rules

i would suspect it’s highly biased to their clubs and tech!

[cnosil]

18 minutes ago, billpierce said:

It’s only as good as :

1 the platform it’s built off azure? Open ai?  Google?

2 the quality of the data it was trained on

3 the bias of the code jockeys

4 the math used to filter or catch bias and or outliers 

5 the rules engine and pattern alignment process such as a covairance matrix and ML rules

i would suspect it’s highly biased to their clubs and tech!

Don't disagree with any of that.   I would guarantee that it is biased to their clubs since that is what it fits you into.   

[HikingMike]

32 minutes ago, cnosil said:

If it is truly AI,  they had a training set of data that they fed into the system that contained the data values and results.   They then imported swing data to validate that the system picked the right results based on predetermined answers.   The AI system will validate how accurate the algorithm is and identify where it has made incorrect selections.  

It could be done lots of ways and it's still truly AI (or ML). I'm curious how they determined which were the correct results in the training data. 

Edited March 6 by HikingMike

[cnosil]

3 minutes ago, HikingMike said:

. I'm curious how they determined which were the correct results in the training data. 

My guess would be the results of fittings done by human fitters.   

[HikingMike]

12 minutes ago, cnosil said:

Don't disagree with any of that.   I would guarantee that it is biased to their clubs since that is what it fits you into.   

Yep, it fits to a Wilson iron. The shaft, length, lie are definitely interesting parts of it.

Quote

The Wilson Fit AI kit features a special fitting club with a Blast Motion swing sensor built into the grip. When connected to the app, the sensor picks up 12,000 swing data points and compares those points to the 325 million swings in the Blast Motion library. All that information goes through Wilson’s proprietary AI system to fit you into a Wilson iron. It also recommends the best shaft for you as well as length and lie.  (link)

This is not going to be limited to Wilson though. I see this being too good for other equipment makers or fitters to ignore, and they'll make their own. 

Quote

 

Wilson Fit AI: Where To Next?

Wilson will be sending the Fit AI kits out to its registered fitters shortly, with plans to launch the program on January 17th. There will be a landing page and dealer locator on the Wilson Golf website to help you find one near you. It’ll be up to the individual fitter what, if anything, they charge for the service.

For 2024, Wilson Fit AI will fit for irons only. Wilson will eventually add drivers, fairways, hybrids, wedges and putters.

Wilson’s fully aware that fitters using this tool will often wind up fitting a golfer into someone else’s product. That’s life in the big city. The company’s hope, however, is that Wilson Fit AI will get more players to, at the very least, try their equipment and bring Wilson into the discussion.

 

Edited March 6 by HikingMike
added another article quote

[cnosil]

3 minutes ago, HikingMike said:

This is not going to be limited to Wilson though. I see this being too good for other equipment makers or fitters to ignore, and they'll make their own. 

This is just the next iteration with more data points.   Most OEM sites have systems were you enter data and it makes club and shaft recommendations.   While this is labelled as AI,  I am not convinced that it is AI as much as a comparison to data points in a database.    

[HikingMike]

7 minutes ago, cnosil said:

My guess would be the results of fittings done by human fitters.   

Right. Could be. 

Quote

When connected to the app, the sensor picks up 12,000 swing data points and compares those points to the 325 million swings in the Blast Motion library. All that information goes through Wilson’s proprietary AI system to fit you into a Wilson iron. It also recommends the best shaft for you as well as length and lie.

Quote

The first Wilson Fit AI iteration featured the football sensor strapped to a golf club. It was unusable but it did prove the concept and led to the partnership with Blast Motion.

So, did they have a fitter make a fitting decision for those 325 million swings? How many fittings would that be? Say 50 swings per fitting, and that would be 325 million / 50 = 6.5 million fittings. Anybody know how many Wilson iron fittings are done? Is that in the realm of possibility? Seems like a lot.

[billpierce]

22 minutes ago, cnosil said:

Don't disagree with any of that.   I would guarantee that it is biased to their clubs since that is what it fits you into.   

Exactly. So while you may learn something unless it’s Wilson it may need a grain of salt lol

 

[HikingMike]

5 minutes ago, cnosil said:

This is just the next iteration with more data points.   Most OEM sites have systems were you enter data and it makes club and shaft recommendations.   While this is labelled as AI,  I am not convinced that it is AI as much as a comparison to data points in a database.    

Yeah I don't know how they're doing it, and AI is thrown around a lot lately. I'm not going to call them liars so if I assume it does have an aspect of AI to it, then that would be in the training of the software to take the new data input of my swing and decide on recommendations for club, shaft, length, lie. Or they trained the software, had it build out a database of possibilities for ranges of all the data points, and then that database is used to decide on recommendations (like you mentioned). That would still be AI too, but seems like an unnecessary intermediate step. Now if they aren't training software, then how is it AI? 

The John Barba article mentioned "convoluted", as in "convolutional neural network" so they are claiming it is really AI. Software-wise, I don't see why not. There is a much lower barrier to doing this work than in the past. But I am still curious about the training data. 

Quote

Wilson Fit AI looks at those 12,000 data points and uses a convoluted (in a good way) non-linear path to predict launch, flex, length and lie.