Abstract
Science tackles sports stories For the uninitiated, a game of Australian rules football may seem like a string of random events. But science shows that “random” undersells the possibilities. Researchers led by Peter Sheridan Dodds at the University of Vermont analyzed the “story space” of more than 1,300 Australian Football League matches by tracking the evolving score margin between teams. They found that Aussie rules football presents a broad expanse of possible storylines that were not accurately predicted by a truly random computer model (Phys. Rev. E 2016, DOI: 10.1103/physreve.93.052314). To fully understand what this means, one must understand what “story space” means. A passing familiarity with Australian rules football itself would probably help, too. Suffice it to say that the game combines some of the physical gameplay of rugby with the straight-up magic of quidditch. The Newscripts gang will let Dodds tackle the definition of story space: “There’s a
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