Callaway Golf released a new product line for 2019, unveiling a line of golf clubs that were engineered with the help of artificial intelligence technology. The new clubs will be available at golf retailers nationwide on Feb. 1.
Callaway’s new Epic Flash driver ($530) and Epic Flash fairway wood ($300) both come with Flash Face technology, designed using machine learning. Callaway used a supercomputer to analyze 15,000 different virtual variations of club face design, analyzing the performance of each and thus determining the optimum design. A typical driver face normally only goes through about five to seven virtual iterations, according to Callaway.
“We asked ourselves the question: if we could teach a computer to learn how to design a driver face, could it design a face that was better than the ones we were designing because it would be free of all the rules that we would apply to it?” said Alan Hocknell, Callaway’s Senior VP of Research & Development, according to Forbes. “It would be capable of analyzing all these complex relationships between different parts of the face and the head, and actually analyzing those mathematically in a lot more detail than anything us humans could actually comprehend.”
Callaway claims its new Epic Flash driver will result in greater ball speed and more distance for golfers. While a conventional driver is thicker in the center and gets progressively thinner near the edges of the face, Callaway’s Epic Flash driver, by contrast, is thinner in the center. The club “features dozens of asymmetrical internal ripples in the face that seem to have no logical pattern whatsoever in size, height and configuration,” writes Erik Matuszewski for Forbes.
“Each time the computer went around that loop, it learned a little bit more about the relationships we were probably deaf, dumb and blind to because they were way more multi-dimensional and higher-order than anything we had been able to comprehend,” Hocknell added. “It essentially learned how to design a driver face better than us.”