Sport Is The Next Grand Challenge For Artificial Intelligence: Toward A Science Of Human Physical Skill

We argue that sport represents the next grand challenge for Artificial Intelligence, a domain rich enough to expose the limits of current approaches and structured enough to drive rigorous scientific progress in understanding and modelling human physical skill. Despite rapid advances in language, vision, and robotic manipulation, the physical intelligence required to learn and adapt complex motor skills remains poorly understood and largely unaddressed. We identify two intertwined gaps: the absence of models for human physical skill, and the absence of the scientific agenda needed to build them. We propose concrete directions for how the community can begin to close both.