I keep coming back to a simple question: why do sports need rules? The answer, to me, is the same reason sports are beautiful. I love the creativity, the unpredictability, the attempt to do something nobody expected while competing as hard as you can. Without rules, that isn't sport. It's war, chaos, action without constraint.
The shape of the game
Define a foul. Define a travel. Say you can't use your feet. Suddenly the limits give all that effort a shape. They create the consistency that lets skill be honed, season after season, without making the result predictable. When someone finds a move the game hasn't seen before, the same constraints make it a genuine creative flash. It isn't random noise. It's a new answer to a shared problem.
Playing the whistle
The whole thing breaks if the rules can't be enforced, or if the enforcement itself can be cheated.
A flop exploits exactly that weakness. It turns rule enforcement into a weapon. The player isn't rewarded for winning the play, but for making the official believe a different play happened. Once that works, everyone has an incentive to try it. The rules stop directing creativity and start rewarding a performance for the whistle.
Learning what matters
Two and a half years ago I was sitting at my notebook, thinking about what technology I wanted to build. Basketball technology sounded fun, but I didn't want to put another screen between people and the physical world. Refereeing stayed with me because technology here could make the game more itself: more transparent, more consistent, harder to game.
That means understanding what referees actually do. The craft isn't staring harder at the whole floor. It's knowing where to stand, what to look at, and which detail will matter before the contact arrives. Everything else has to be let go. A machine that judges a live play has to learn that discipline. It can't merely describe what it saw.
I think solving this can make sport better. There is real economic weight inside sport, but the problem would hold me without that. It's a genuine technical question: how well can we measure what happens in the physical world, then make a meaningful call about it?
I want the flop to stop working. I want the creative flash to decide games. More fair, and more beautiful.
I'm building the AI referee.