Puzzle to Ponder: Feel free to suggest solutions in the comments section. Please also email us if you wish to be added to our email list. We wish we had McEnroe by our side to say it for us: they cannot be serious! But we do get annoyed when gullible commentators treat video simulations as if they were reality. Obviously such occurrences are rare, and Hawk-Eye is in general of great assistance to quality linecalling. In such situations, it is not clear that Hawk-Eye will be more accurate than the linesmen. However, since balls can also be hit around the net, not just over it, these troublesome trajectories can definitely occur. You might argue that the high tennis net rules out such skimming shots. And of course Wimbledon's grass court, with its natural unevenness, does not make things any easier. Here, even tiny errors in Hawk-Eye's calculations can create huge errors in determining the precise location of where the ball actually touches the ground. Imagine a ball shooting across the ground at a very shallow trajectory. With just the wrong ball trajectory, Hawk-Eye could definitely be out by centimetres.
However, we do not believe that Hawk-Eye will always be accurate to within 10 millimetres. We have little doubt that, though not perfect, Hawk-Eye is in general very accurate. However, as British academics Harry Collins and Robert Evans have noted, precise details of the testing of Hawk-Eye are not made available. This makes it difficult to know exactly what is true, or even what "average error" means in the context of these tests. The International Tennis Federation demands that any electronic system must never be in error by more than 10 millimetres, and that the average error must be below 5 millimetres. It is claimed that Hawk-eye is accurate well within these tolerances. But any such filming and reconstruction will always contain some approximation and some error.
Hawk-Eye takes video footage from up to ten high-speed cameras and uses the footage to reconstruct the trajectory of the ball. Hawk-Eye will occasionally get it wrong, of course, notwithstanding some confusing hype on the official website. How do we know Hawk-Eye is infallible? Because the tennis commentators constantly act as if Hawk-Eye is infallible. Which is why the infallible computer system known as Hawk-Eye was introduced.
Of course, balls are much more commonly miscalled simply as a result of human error.
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