I Helped Chinese Football Get Back on Its Feet

She can calculate 122,880 possible outcomes for a match, but she can’t figure out why people won’t listen to her.

Mulan, a product of the "Great Wall: Dawn" initiative, is an AI that cost as much as three aircraft carriers. Now she’s the head coach of China’s men’s national football team.

She weighs the players’ meals down to the gram. Her predictions of cramps are never off. She turns formations into equations and explains defense through fluid dynamics. The players hate her, the media vilifies her, and the entire internet is waiting to see when this "coach" who can’t play football will get kicked out.

But little by little, they realize the machine remembers what time each of them wakes up at night. She knows who gets angry when substituted. She even disabled her public-opinion monitoring module just to write them a set of personalized training goals.

She never makes mistakes. She’s simply learning to understand a group of people who do.