#599: Aimotion

Having glimpsed bits of the Olympics I’ve been surprised that the shooting events don’t seem to include some element of moving target work (even medieval archery used pendula). That would surely be a much more natural test of marksmanship than hammering pellets into a single stationary bullseye.

Today’s invention is a computer-driven target which moves within a fixed radius but with the centre point executing some form of random walk. The radius of movement could be varied dependent upon the distance from the target. Also the frequency of direction change might follow a Levy flight pattern.

This would provide a more challenging task than firing at a fixed setup and it could be proved to be fair to all competitors as well as being statistically more meaningful (assuming a sufficiently long window for firing was allowed and a greater number of shots).