What I learned from watching the film Rocky Balboa on TV a few nights ago: In the late 1960s, the fighting styles, punching patterns, and other data about famous boxers like Jack Dempsey, Max Baer, Rocky Marciano, and Muhammad Ali were entered into a computer to produce simulated “fights” between individuals who were never in the ring together. The simulations were then narrated as radio plays. Taking the idea further in 1970, Muhammad Ali and Rocky Marciano, weeks before his death in a plane crash, were filmed in a studio acting out a slew of fight situations. Those moments were then edited together into the fight film above based on the outcome of another computer simulation. From Wikipedia’s description of the first round of simulations for the radio plays:
Punch-by-punch details of the boxer’s records during their prime were entered into an NCR 315 computer. Also their strengths, weaknesses, fighting styles and patterns and other factors and scenarios that the boxers could go through were converted into formulas.The NCR-315 with 20K of memory was supplied by SPS (Systems Programming Services), an independent service bureau in Miami Fla. The algorithms were supplied by an NCR mathematician, and programming was done in Fortran by an employee of SPS. Hank Meyer, President and salesman with a one other partner in SPS, was instrumental in setting this competition up, and contended at the time that it was his idea. The actual running of the software was done the night before each broadcast round of the ‘computer championship’ and took approximately 45 minutes to run, the ouptut was a formatted report containing a series of codes describing each punch. This was then written to magnetic tape, the tape was then manually transferred to a Univac 1005 and printed. This early form of “foot-powered” networking was referred to as sneakernet, the reason for doing this was cost, it was cheaper to print on a 1005 than the 315. This took place in early 1968; the NCR 315 was a state-of-the-art computer at the time…
On January 20, 1970, the (Ali/Marciano fight film) was shown only once in 1500 theaters over closed-circuit television in the United States, Canada, and throughout Europe. It grossed $5 million. The computer had determined that Marciano would knock Ali out in the 13th round and the film was edited to present that outcome. All prints of the fight except one were supposed to be immediately destroyed. However, many theaters played the show long after January 20th.