Toward curling informatics — Digital scorebook development and game information analysis

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of curling informatics and the digital scorebook system iCE which was developed to support strategies and tactics in curling - a winter team sport played on ice. Our project aims to develop an environment to support curling strategies and tactics by realizing methods to record game information, analyzing, visualizing and sharing the information. We developed the digital scorebook system iCE (intelligent Curling Elicitator) as the first step of our concept. We tested our system by recording real game information at the top-level championships. Consequently, we confirmed that the system performs adequately for practical use. Moreover, we analyzed the recorded information in detail, and the results suggest differences in shot accuracies relating to the differences in game scores. This suggests that our proposed method can effectively support strategic/tactical planning in curling games.