Korea's first collective intelligence study, the Baek In-cheon Project!

The power of baseball fans, active not only in the scientific community but also around the world, has been sublimated into collective intelligence research.
The book deals with the mystery of the disappearance of the .400 hitter from Korean professional baseball, ending with Baek In-cheon, who played as the manager and 4th hitter for the MBC Blue Dragons in 1982, the first year of Korean professional baseball.
But it's not just a simple baseball science book about old baseball topics.
This is an official research paper and process in which ordinary citizens who have never studied baseball or statistics professionally gathered through social media to challenge the mystery of baseball.
We traced the development of citizen science, Korea's first collective intelligence research project and a voluntary initiative.

This project, which lasted nearly four months from November 2011 to April 12, 2012, thoroughly investigated and analyzed the KBO's database and related baseball records, applied and reviewed various statistical techniques, and examined whether Stephen Jay Gould's hypothesis could be applied to the problem of the disappearance of .400 hitters.
According to him, the disappearance of .400 hitters is not due to the laziness of hitters or the game environment, but rather to the 'evolutionary stabilization of the system' of American professional baseball.
He explains that the general characteristic is that the skills of baseball players are becoming equalized, and players with excessively high or low batting averages are disappearing around the average batting average.

So what about Korean professional baseball? The book reveals that the past Korean professional baseball system also stabilized as the capabilities of hitters, pitchers, and defense improved, and the entire Korean professional baseball system developed. As a result, the exceptional presence of the .400 hitter disappeared.
As a result, through numerous discussions and debates, we were able to identify and correct several errors in KBO's data and publish an official scientific paper in English.
The book details these processes and debates, and the process leading up to their conclusion, in a fascinating way. It is also a record of the achievement of presenting a new research methodology.
Let's check out the stories of people who will write new history in this book.

Korean baseball studies will begin here!

The average number of authors in a scientific paper in the 1960s was 1.3.
However, in the 1990s, the number increased to 3.1 people, and recently exceeded 4 people.
In other words, it requires the contributions of four or more scientists to complete a single scientific study.
In recent years, scientific research has gradually shifted to complex topics that require the integration of knowledge and technology from various fields. As a result, the number of cases where multiple researchers participate has increased, and collaborative research has become particularly common.

Meanwhile, with the advent of the 21st century Web 2.0 era, several attempts have emerged around the world to explore whether it is possible to conduct scientific research using “collective intelligence.”
A representative example is the SETI@home project.
SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) is an astronomical study to determine whether intelligent life exists in space beyond our solar system by analyzing interstellar signals that would be used if extraterrestrial intelligent life exists.
It became widely known through astronomer Carl Sagan's novel 『Contact』 (2 volumes, translated by Lee Sang-won, Science Books, 2001), and its predecessor, the Ozma Project, began in the 1960s, but no trace of extraterrestrial intelligence has been found in the past 50 years.

As a result, in the late 1990s, the U.S. Congress decided to no longer provide national budget support to the SETI plan.
Suddenly, with budgets so tight, we reached a point where we couldn't use supercomputers to analyze the massive amounts of data we received from outer space.
To address this issue, researchers attempted a distributed computing project called 'SETI@Home', which utilizes personal computers sitting idle in homes around the world to conduct analysis rather than relying solely on large-scale supercomputers to continue their projects.

On May 17, 1999, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, released a screensaver program on the web that, when downloaded, automatically analyzes extraterrestrial radio telescope signal data and sends it to a research lab in Berkeley while the personal computer is idle.
The screensaver is a scientific research program.
This type of research allows the general public to experience how scientific research is conducted, along with the pride of knowing they are contributing to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
So, in the age of social networking services (SNS), how can we leverage collective intelligence to conduct scientific research? What kind of collaborative research can scientists conduct with the followers with whom they regularly exchange scientific stories? Since I first started using Twitter in January 2010, this question has been constantly on my mind.

To bring out collective intelligence, several project conditions were necessary.
First, it had to be a topic of general interest and research that could arouse public curiosity. Second, it had to be research that required the efforts of a group and not something that could be carried out by one or two scientists. Third, the process of recruiting research participants, conducting the research, and presenting it to the world had to be transparent and open. Lastly, the entire group had to be able to participate in the interpretation of the results and share the significance of the research in a special way.

We designed a research project that would satisfy these conditions to the greatest extent possible, and launched the so-called 'Baek In-cheon Project' in December 2011.
This project is an ambitious study that aims to answer the question, "Why have .400 hitters disappeared from professional baseball?" by analyzing all data from the past 30 years of Korean professional baseball.
In American professional baseball, which began in 1871, there hasn't been a .400 hitter since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941.
There has yet to be a .400 hitter in Japanese professional baseball.
In Korea, there has not been a .400 hitter in professional baseball since Baek In-cheon hit over .412 in 1982, the first year of professional baseball.
What on earth could be the reason?

There have been conflicting opinions in the baseball world regarding the reason why .400 hitters have disappeared.
Sports newspapers also attacked the hitters, blaming their laziness and indolence for not training properly during the stove league (the period between the end of one professional baseball season and the start of the next) because they were obsessed with salary negotiations.
The emergence of professional closers and middle relievers, the rise of doubleheaders, and night games were also blamed for the unfavorable environment for hitters. Scientists' interest in this strange baseball problem was sparked by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who was born in 1941, the year Ted Williams last hit .400.
In an essay he published in a magazine and later in his book, Full House (translated by Lee Myeong-hee, Science Books, 2001), he made a novel attempt to explain this problem not as the laziness of the players or the economic environment, but as the “evolutionary stabilization of the system.”
The professional baseball league is also a kind of huge 'ecosystem' that gradually goes through an evolutionary stage of stabilization.

In other words, as many natural systems mature, the "variance" of characteristics among individuals decreases around the average, and it is a common characteristic that baseball players' skills become more and more equalized, with players with excessively high or excessively low batting averages gradually disappearing around the average batting average.
So, as enough time passes, the gap between players narrows, and not only do .100 hitters disappear, but so do .400 hitters.

To confirm this hypothesis, he analyzed the results of 100 years of American professional baseball and clearly explained why the gap in batting averages narrowed and the .400 hitter inevitably disappeared even though the average batting average of batters increased (in other words, the skill of batters did not decrease). Then, is it for the same reason that the .400 hitter disappeared from the Korean professional baseball league, which celebrated its 32nd year in 2013? Has the gap in batting average and earned run average between players in Korean professional baseball also been narrowing over the past 30 years? The 'Baek In-cheon Project' is a group study that analyzed the data of Korean professional baseball over the past 30 years to statistically analyze how the skills of batters, pitchers, and defense have evolved and whether Korean professional baseball has also entered a stabilization phase.

The topic of this research project was one that could arouse public curiosity, while also being scientifically meaningful, and, above all, it was a question that could summarize the past 30 years of Korean professional baseball.
It was a small question, but I thought it could lead to countless other questions, ultimately leading to a look into the 30-year history of the vast system that is Korean professional baseball. On December 18, 2011, I posted a trembling tweet, appealing for participation, announcing the launch of the "Baek In-cheon Project."
Then, about 100 volunteers responded that they would be willing to participate.
He also expressed his willingness to participate in large-scale baseball data analysis, literature research, and scientific paper writing.
As many as 300 people sent comments wishing the research success.
It has become possible to conduct 'Sabermetrics' research using collective intelligence.

In early 2012, the Winter Stove League brought together individuals driven by pure scientific curiosity and passion to conduct large-scale data analysis research that scientists alone could never accomplish.
We decided to communicate via Twitter, create academic papers for scientists, and publish Korean-language reports for the general public. Then, every Saturday for three months, once every week or two, we gathered at a cafe or in a space provided free of charge by the Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity to scientifically explore the question, "Why have .400 hitters disappeared from professional baseball around the world?"
The first thing we did was organize the data.
I have started working on transferring the Korean professional baseball yearbook of the past 30 years to a file.
There were already a few files circulating in the world, but it needed to be verified to be accurate.
So, we divided up the roles among people and worked on checking the data.
We analyzed the data obtained in this way, interpreted the results, and prepared papers and reports.

Since most of the participants had never done scientific research before, there were many conflicts and difficulties at first.
But even that conflict felt like a thrilling experiment to me.
We decided to release the results of our four-month collective research on April 12, 2012, to commemorate Baek In-cheon's batting average of .412, and we greeted that moment with tears and overwhelming emotion.
This book is a record of the history of those 100 days of passionate passion.
What makes this project, which involved 78 ordinary people recruited through Twitter and met weekly, interesting is that all the participants were "amateur scientists" who had never properly written a scientific paper.
Since anyone who liked baseball could participate, it was a feat in itself to complete a paper worthy of submission to a foreign magazine in just four months while working a regular job. (The paper was written by a whopping 58 people!) In the era of Web 2.0, knowledge as a product of collective intelligence, represented by Wikipedia, began to hold greater meaning than the 'refined knowledge of experts' symbolized by the 'Encyclopedia Britannica'.
However, this Baek In-cheon project was an attempt to gauge whether it was possible to create scientific knowledge, even if only in a simple way, by going beyond the level of Wikipedia, which is a patchwork of knowledge already released to the world by collective intelligence.
This was an attempt to explore whether 'public participation in science' was possible beyond the popular understanding of science.

Through the Baek In-cheon Project, we learned that ordinary people can easily accomplish research that would be difficult for a scientist to do alone, and that when ordinary people's talents come together, they can acquire the expertise to write professional scientific papers.
This is the lesson learned by the 58 "collective intelligence" members of this project. When the 2012 professional baseball regular season began and Kim Tae-kyun hit well over .400, sports reporters frequently requested interviews.
I wonder if there will be a .400 hitter this year, and if so, wouldn't the question, "Why did the .400 hitter disappear?" lose its meaning?
But in the end, there was no .400 hitter in the 2012 season.
To be honest, I was secretly worried that Kim Tae-kyun would finish the 2012 season with a .400 batting average, but I also earnestly hope that one day we will see a .400 hitter.
However, I wanted to show in this book that paradoxically, it is the absence, rather than the emergence, of .400 hitters that proves the outstanding skills of Korean professional baseball players.

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Baek In-cheon, who helped complete this book, as well as the Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity, Science Books, SisaIN, and many others who sent their warm support through Twitter.
Thanks to them, this research project, which was a first attempt and involved many trials and errors, was finally able to bear fruit after many twists and turns.
I sincerely hope that this research project will not be a one-time event, but will lead to a great baseball research society like the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), laying the foundation for scientific analysis of Korean baseball.
Why have .400 hitters disappeared from professional baseball? This book will help you experience this simple question taking on a special meaning.
And I sincerely hope that your Stove League outside the baseball stadium will become a Korean Series filled with intellectual curiosity and collective passion, and I return to my daily routine at the plate.

On behalf of the Baek In-cheon project team
Jaeseung Jeong (Professor, Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, KAIST)

--- From the text