Education

Title: What If an Associate Professor at IMI Becomes a Baseball Manager?

Speaker: Dr. Akifumi Kira (Institute of Mathematics for Industry, Kyushu University)

Place: IMI Auditorium(W1-D-413) and Live streaming with zoom

Attendance: 63 (Students: 29; Staffs: 28; Other: 6)

In this talk, the speaker explained how to derive the optimal strategy for baseball game. Considering a baseball game as a simplified model, the speaker discussed how the winning percentage changes depending on the presence or absence of starlings, sacrifice hits, intentional walks and so on. Based on this consideration, whether a sacrifice bunt is effective or not, and whether the feild first is advantageous or not were discussed. Since baseball is a well-known sport in Japan, there were many questions, and the talk was very lively.