Hi Dotikers!

The quintuple jump in figure skating is the sport's holy grail. Five complete rotations in under a second, landing on a blade just 4 millimeters wide. Physicists said it was impossible. Ilia Malinin, the American "Quad God" who has already landed seven quads in a single program, says he's "almost there" and will reveal it after the Milan Cortina Olympics. And to help him cross that threshold, MIT has developed OOFSkate.

The concept is clever. Jerry Lu, a former researcher at the MIT Sports Lab, realized that AI pose estimators excel precisely where skating needs them: measuring jump height, counting rotations, analyzing landings. No need for body sensors or fancy cameras, a simple smartphone will do. The app then compares the skater's metrics to Olympic champions and even predicts what score an international panel would give.

But the real question MIT researchers are asking goes far beyond technique. Can you teach an AI to judge the beauty of a free program? Figure skating is an ideal testing ground: it's one of the few domains where aesthetics receive a numerical score. The researchers want to understand whether AI follows the same reasoning as humans to say "that's beautiful," or simply regurgitates learned judgments.

Professor Peko Hosoi has done the math: the quintuple is within the limits of the human body. The sextuple is not. We're touching the ceiling of what physics allows. Malinin might just push that boundary before our eyes, with AI as his invisible copilot.

Alexis

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