Imagine a tennis player practicing with a ball machine that is adjusted three notches above the pace the player is expected to handle.

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My ball machine also became a flash point of potential danger.

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Enter video analysis, which has evolved plenty since I was in high school and used an 8 mm camera to tape myself hitting against the tennis ball machine.

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He works through an array of ball-machine drills and hitting patterns as Luciani paces nearby.

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Previous consumer-created ads for Doritos, including one that showed a vengeful dog securing an electronic bark collar on a guy, and another that featured an office worker slamming a crystal ball into a vending machine, have notched top slots on USA Today's annual Super Bowl Ad Meter.

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He credits this machine for his ability to zing a ball from the outfield to home plate even if there's no time for any warmup throws.

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Traveling down from the top of the hierarchy to the base sensations, he figures, the neocortex functions as a prediction machine, anticipating what we will see next, where the ball is headed or how an experiment might turn out.

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When a ball is pitched to the robot, an accelerometer at the back of a batting cage records information about the flight of the ball, including its speed, and this data is relayed back to a machine that holds the GPU-powered brain.

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Pelz has tested this with a machine that shows the pros usually misjudge the line and speed needed to put a ball in the hole.

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