Can a computer improve your pool game?

While researching Sweet, I had the good fortune to meet with Tony Jebara, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. I arranged a meeting with him after I learned that he and his research partner had created a "wearable computer" that, when aimed at a pool table, calculates the most appropriate shot for the pool player to take — and even shows that player exactly how to make the shot. It's a weird, creepy, interesting device. But does it ultimately taint the game of pool?

One day, while surfing the Internet, plugging various pool-related words and phrases into different search engines, I come across the term "Stochasticks," which soon leads me to Assistant Professor Tony Jebara, who teaches in Columbia University's "machine learning lab" (part of the university's computer science department) and who, with a partner, has invented a device that fits on your head and, when aimed at a pool table, can calculate and plot the best pool shot and can even show you the exact trajectory the object ball will take if hit correctly. It's the mediocre pool player's dream machine.

A few more clicks of the mouse teach me that Stochasticks is a play on the word stochastics, which is the combination of probability and statistics. Jebara simply changed the suffix to "sticks," to bring cue sticks to mind.

Tony Jebara and Alex Pentland have done an extraordinary amount of research on wearable computers, devices that often employ miniature mounted cameras, tiny, highly sensitive microphones, and goggles with heads-up displays. I also learn that Jebara is a huge science fiction fan. It looks to me as if he's found the right calling.

I examine a digital photo of the Stochasticks gadget. I see a pair of high-tech-looking goggles, reminiscent of Clarice Starling's night-vision goggles in the film The Silence of the Lambs. They're connected to a computer mounted in a backpack. According to articles on the device, when the system is turned on, it recognizes everything — the cue ball, all of the object balls, the six pockets on a pool table, and of course, the cue stick. The player simply peers at the pool table through the goggles. The angles and possible trajectories of the shot are then displayed on the headset and superimposed on the pool table. What the Stochasticks computer is doing is calculating the shot with the highest probability of success based on the current position of the balls. When the goggle-wearer looks at the pool table, he sees actual lines drawn from the cue ball to the object ball and from the object ball to the pocket. And as he aims his cue stick, the display even points out which part of the ball he should hit to make the shot. The damn thing calculates English (sidespin) too. I'm agog. Professor Jebara is quoted as saying that the wearable computer is "like a third eye."

Reading further, I discover a major flaw in the system, at least from the pool-playing perspective, which is that it cannot calculate where the cue ball will end up after the shot is made. In other words, it can think on the spot, but it can't think ahead. Well, what the hell's the point then? I decide to pose this question to Jebara himself.

It takes me an hour to get to Columbia by subway. I introduced myself to Jebara via email, and after some back and forth had made an appointment with him. I've been to Columbia's campus before. It's both urban and majestic: boxy when necessary and grand and ornate when allowed. I alight from the subway, cross the main quad, and wind my way behind several bland buildings until I find the Schapiro Center for Engineering and Physical Science Research, which houses part of the computer science department as well as one of its wunderkinds: Professor Tony Jebara.

Jebara meets me at his office and I'm immediately struck by how young and sleek he is. Though I know from his résumé (also pulled from the Internet) that he's in his early 30s, I still expect someone older, a socially uncomfortable geek with frayed posters of William Shatner on his walls and overly thumbed-through copies of Dune on his bookshelves, or else a wild, hand-waving, mad-scientist type, with a great heap of hair and layers of rumpled clothing, along with the requisite mismatched socks, sallow skin, and poor diet.

Tony Jebara is neither. He's like the computer code I'm sure he can write in his sleep: long, thin, elegant lines of letters and numbers and angular symbols, columns of text with the air of something foreign, something intriguing — even beckoning — and yet, except to a very few, completely inaccessible. We shake hands. He's tall and slender and folds himself neatly into his chair. He comes across as hip, downtown, with narrow, rectangular, black-framed glasses, high cheekbones, smooth olive skin, and bristly dark hair, cut well. He's unfailingly polite — aloof, gracious, like a magician toying with his audience. I'm a bit cowed, and so blurt out the exact opposite of what I think I'm going to say.

"Doesn't Stochasticks take all of the romance out of pool?"

He smiles. "I think the idea would be to use it just for practice." He tells me he and his research partner, Alex Pentland, came up with the system not because either of them are pool enthusiasts (he confesses he almost never plays, nor really enjoys watching it that much) but because the game of pool is the perfect forum for demonstrating what their wearable computer can do. These days most of his and his department's energies are concentrated on developing systems that can be used for "security."

"You mean like, national security? In-the-wake-of-9/11-type security?"

Yes, that's what he means, though he isn't specific, despite my prodding. Well, I concede, that makes sense. Improving your pool game does seem a bit frivolous with international flights being cancelled because of hijacking fears, and embassies being evacuated, and terror alert levels going from yellow to orange to puce to burgundy to deep plum.

I ask if I can try the device, but to my dismay it's been locked away, and it's too much of an ordeal to retrieve it and set it up, though the department does bring it out for open houses sometimes, because it's fun and always attracts attention. Instead he shows me a videotape of the time a television station sent someone to interview him — and to observe a group of pool players in Brooklyn as they tried out the Stochasticks system. I recognize the poolroom, which is in the southern part of Park Slope. I've played there with my friend Beth.

Jebara is one of the most unruffled human beings I've ever encountered. None of the unsophisticated questions I ask as I watch the tape ("What about defensive shots? Sometimes not making a shot is the best strategy. Will it tell you that?") pique his interest or his ire. He does mention that while it's true that aids such as Stochasticks give people an "unfair advantage in everyday life," this is okay. "After all, that's what technology's been doing for the last century, when you think about it."

I remember a version of this quote from one of the articles I read about him. It seems a bit cold, capitalistic, even Machiavellian. And also undeniably accurate. What I think he means is that technology helps us tap into areas we might never have thought to explore, but I stay quiet. My stumped silence encourages him to explain himself further.

"Think of it this way," he says. "It used to be that no one could conceive of using cell phones, except maybe in emergencies. Now people use them all the time, even as their main phone. Some people get rid of their land lines altogether. And yet cell phones can do so much more than just connect one caller to another, like the typical telephone. You can send photos, text messages, tap into the Internet, a whole host of things."

"Make coffee?" I say brightly.

He ignores me. "So we use cell phones now, but we don't always take full advantage of them. The technologies we're developing here in the lab have a lot of uses, a lot of advantages. And there are always going to be people who take advantage of everything a particular technology has to offer, as well as people who use technology only for the obvious, and other than that take advantage of very little. We want everyone to get as much as possible from technology. So maybe we present something in a way that's a little sexier, like with pool..."

I nod. "It's like that urban myth about our brain capacity."

He cocks his head. His dark eyebrows raise almost imperceptibly. I had brought up this same theory during a lesson with Armand, one of my pool mentors.

"You know, that supposedly human beings use only 10% of their brains, that there's 90% of our brain capacity that we don't ever use, but if we could tap into it, well, who knows what we could accomplish."

For the first time Tony Jebara's face breaks its serenity and comes alive. His eyes widen and he smiles and leans forward. "Yes. Yes. That's it exactly."

We're having a moment, Tony and I. We sit there nodding and smiling at each other for a few seconds, and then the moment passes. I make a few more banal comments, hoping I can elicit another intense reaction from him. While he does not look at his watch or ask me if there is anything else I need, I can tell he wants to wrap things up. He's generously given me almost an hour-and-a-half of his time. I ask if I can see the lab where they come up with all of these technologies, and he nods and takes me down a cinderblock hallway; we turn corners several times so that I'm completely confused about where we are in reference to his office, to the campus, to the city of New York, to the world.

The lab is smaller than I expect. There's one guy in a plaid flannel shirt hunched in front of a screen, working on something, but it's empty and lifeless otherwise. There are lots of cool-looking computers, but no pool table. As if reading my thoughts, Tony Jebara says, "We used to have the pool table here," and points to an empty space. "People loved to play, even without the headgear. It was a fun way to take a break, but we needed the room for other projects."

"Like national security," I say. He smiles wanly and brushes off the comment.

After that he shows me how to get out of the building, and stands patiently while I pump his hand and thank him profusely and tell him I'll tell all of my pool-playing friends about his work. "They might think I'm a traitor," I say, almost to myself, sort of second-guessing my mission.

"No," he says, and wags his finger. "You're just taking advantage of technology."

I tap my head. "Right. Just using my brain capacity." He smiles and glides off while I head down the stairs and back toward the main quad, blending in with the students, all of us presumably in search of some greater knowledge, some higher truth.

←Back to Outtakes