Hasnain says:

Did not know much about professional bowling before this (played a lot as a kid though). The novelty of the approach sometimes reminds me of how deep learning based game AIs come up with crazy novel strategies because they learn from a blank slate. How many innovations do we lose out on because we educate humans to think a certain way? (Not that I think we shouldn’t, but still..)

“His destiny was sealed shortly before his birth, when his parents, who knew almost nothing about the sport, opened a bowling center near their home in Orange, Australia, some 160 miles northwest of Sydney. As a toddler, unable to manage the 10-pound house balls with one hand, young Jason rolled them down the lanes with two. At age 7, he tried bowling one-handed for all of 10 minutes—“just sucked,” he once said—and never looked back.

The criticism assumed a plaintive tone at first. “It was, Come on, you’re a big boy now. It’s time to bowl properly,” Belmonte recalls. As a 10-year-old, when he was beating bowlers five and six years his senior, the accusations grew more hurtful, impugning his character: cheat. “There was frustration on why I wouldn’t convert, and that was where I felt a loneliness,” he says. “Because when you’re young you want to feel part of the community. And I didn’t. No one wanted to coach me. They all wanted to convert me. And so there was a point where it was like, I’m just going to do this myself.””

Posted on 2023-07-02T05:39:29+0000