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Callaway epic flash11/18/2023 ![]() The design of Epic Flash, and specifically the Flash Face, started as a theoretical challenge and if it were to work, the numerical optimisation done by a computer could produce a different face. What does ‘designed by Artificial Intelligence’ actually mean? But what if we could speed up this process, and go through it not just six times, but many, many more times? Could there be a way to use a computer to learn more about the performance of the face that we as humans could not achieve? On average, we would do this detailed cycle about six times during the design of a driver. We do a lot of this analysis but a person has to study these findings, make some modifications on a computer, and undertake the process again and again to see if we can improve things. This would tell us details about speed of the ball, the amount of stress on the face, whether the face remained ‘legal’. Over the past 10-15 years we have been using analysis packages that have simulated the collision of the ball on the face. We started by asking ourselves a question: ‘What if we could get ourselves in a position where we created the rules of design, and then let a computer go off and explore what is possible in that design space?’ The challenge we set ourselves was how to break out of this design cycle and test our human-led product development approaches that are, to some extent, getting in the way of future thinking.Ĭallaway launch three new golf balls: Supersoft, Supersoft Magna & ERC Soft Where did you begin? Performance breakthrough in the development of Jailbreak Technology. However, we felt our progress was starting to stagnate, even though we have seen a huge And this face will not work in any other driver.” But when you look this, you’d say ‘what on earth is that?’ We’ve had to invent new processes for manufacturing and measurement – there are no easily measure flat surfaces – in addition to all the work to write software, so it’s not at all clear to our competitors what on earth we did to arrive at this. “We get all our competitors’ drivers, cut them open and take a look, and usually they carry the blueprint of what the design team was thinking – where they chose to put the weight, why it’s stiffer here, that kind of thing. You can illustrate the benefits of this driver very clearly because there’s a direct advantage in ball speed. ![]() So you’re best shots just got even better, which is something we haven’t been able to say for a while. This face does that, but also delivers more ball speed from the centre of the face. In a lot of our driver designs of the past we were limited by the rules about the ball speed from the middle, so we focused on ball speed when you don’t hit the centre. It’s completely the reverse of some of the things you’ve seen from us. “The centre of the face is now the thinnest region of the face, not the thickest. So when I said the computer went round the loop 15,000 times, we actually did that process about four times, and each time it was on us to refine the rules we were giving the computer, so it came up with an even better solution.” And the worst part about it was that if it didn’t work, we didn’t know how to modify it to make it work. “People rightly said ‘you’re the head of R&D, you’re supposed to know how your clubs work’, and I didn’t know how it worked. “Did what it come up with surprise me? It scared the hell out of me to be honest. “We couldn’t have come up with Flash Face using conventional engineering principles,” said Hocknell. Through Machine Learning their computers cycled through 15,000 face architecture iterations, learning from each one, before arriving at Flash Face. and machine learning we couldn’t have come up with this design.”īut as Callaway admitted, they wouldn’t have even gone in the direction of Epic Flash if not for the computer: A new driver face design typically takes eight to ten iterations. “Flash Face isn’t something a human would have arrived at any time soon,” said Alan Hocknell, Callaway’s R&D boss. ➤ Callaway Epic Flash Sub Zero Fairway Wood
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