I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
And when I find my ball in a bride egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida egg, Frida egg egg, Frida egg, bride egg.
Lie, I'm about ready to run off the golf course. And Welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today we are talking about new digital technologies and their potential influence on golf course design. This is something that's been on my mind a lot lately. The pace of technological progress seems to be just quickening and quickening. The artificial intelligence stuff that's come out in recent months
and weeks has been just insane, like chat GPT. I'm sure you've seen that I used to be in English heature. That piece of technology alone would have completely changed the way that I approached my job as an English teacher. And so I'm sort of wondering at what point is some of this new technology going to make its way into golf architecture in a big way and really restructure how that business is done. So to sort through these issues,
I'm going to talk to Peter Florey. Peter is probably best known in the golf world as one of the driving forces behind the LEDO Recreation project in Wisconsin. It was really Peter's research that made a lot of that possible, and he used some very interesting digital methods in that process. So we're going to talk about that and also just about new technologies that are becoming available to golf course architects and developers, including some pretty wild AI stuff. So
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go to Peter Floyd. All right, So I thought a good way to start this conversation that we're going to have about digital technology and its effect on golf course design would be to tell a story about how you've used some of this technology in an actual project. Right, So, you are a key part of the Lido project in Wisconsin. You initially modeled that lost Ceb McDonald SETH Rayner golf course, and what you did really enabled the architects at Tom
Doakes Firm to recreate the course in a completely different location. Now, you've told me previously that this was more of a research project than a technological one, but certainly technology was involved in it. So maybe you could just tell me how you created your digital version of the Lido and what technology you did use to help you in this process.
Yeah. I think it's an interesting case because most of the technology had been existing for a while before this, and it just sort of took this case to sort of push it to everyone's attention. As you're saying, most of the leader research could have been done on anything.
I could have sculpted it in clay, you know, I could have used older programs, but the newer programs are very convenient, and I guess it did play a role because the research sort of compounded, so that having a three dimensional model that you could rotate and look at from different vantage points, with different focal lengths and all that really did have a compounding effect because when I got more and more photos, we could start to sort of rotate and identify unknown photos, photos that no one
knew which hole. It was all of a sudden, I could see the clubhouse in the distance, and I could see a couple of telephone poles and other landmarks, and I could just sort of match the angle and then I'm like, Okay, that's got to be the fifteenth green. And then once you know that, you know that may be in the background of another photo, and as sort of a chain reaction of identification of photos. And I guess if I was using clay it would be harder to do that. But the technology I was using was
fairly basic. There's a lot more advanced technology than that, but I'd say it was good enough to do the trick for this project. And then once I created the digital model, there were more sort of technological applications that we had to improvise. I say we, but Tom Doak and his team and Brian Zeger. They had to figure out how to extract it from the environment that I created in which it wasn't programmed to be extracted, so
that was a whole tech issue. And then using sort of the save as feature by scanning what Tom Doak and Brian Schneider and those guys would put in the ground.
You know, they're working in pure sand there, and they would sort of get a rough draft from the digital model with GPS dozers, and then they would refine it and sculpt it the best that they could using photos and all sorts of other things, and then before the wind would blow it away and destroy it, they could laser scan it and sort of save as and then do whatever else they needed to do and then come back and restore it to that And that's one of
the interesting sort of technologies that emerged, or the usefulness of it emerged during this project. And I think Tom has talked about how he just thought of other uses for it, like you going over to New Zealand less and doing a bunch of grains at a time and sort of saving them all as. And then he could not travel there seven times, but only once or twice.
Gotcha all right? I think I'd like a little more detail about your initial digital model of the lido that you created in a video game called The Golf Club. So tell me about the technology that went into that and the process that you used to create this model that you know, when you first were creating it really stunned people in its specificity and kind of led to the process that this project ended up following. So what was that initial digital version of the leado? How did you create that?
So just a little bit background. I've always dabbled in I mean, I remember being in middle school and like Jack Nicholas's program came out that I thought looked photo realistic then and now it looks like Pong in comparison. But you know, I would I would geek out on
that after school. So I think I had some I was drawn to it a bit, and I was sort of kept up with, you know, links golf, had sort of a designer and other things, but it went dormant for a while when I got into work life, and I guess what rekindled the interest was we we built a house and I had the idea to put a simulator in the basement, and my my kids were sort of getting a little interested in golf, and the software that I use was the Golf Club for that simulator,
and I figured out that I could design holes that were more fit for like a seven year old. So I just I knew it had designer component, and I would go in there and just be like, Okay, it'd be cool if they had a water carry, you know, ten yard water carry to a really easy grain with a big backstop. I just started screwing around like that and creating kids courses, and then after a while I sort of got comfortable with it, and I started to see the power of it. And again that's a very
simple rendering program. It's very easy to use. Anyone could pick it up. But I'm like, it's actually pretty good, and it's you get the reward of being able to play it. And so I've always been interested in lost golf courses, and I was a member of Olympic fields that had two lost golf courses, and so that was my first entry point, is, man, maybe I could figure out what those were. And I started kind of screwing around in the program and importing the lidar and researching
their history room. And then I think the second project was probably mill road farm up in Lake Forest, the famous loss course, and I rendered that one completely and then kind of moved onto Ocean Links and a few others. And I was still working during this time, but I had a big, heavy burst of work and then all of a sudden kind of a lull, and I just I'm like, man, what would be the holy grail of lost golf? To see if I could do here and see if I could revive and go play in my basement?
And the Leado had always been the lost city of Atlantis and the golf architecture community, and at that point I didn't really know much about it. I had seen a few pictures. I viewed it as a kind of a geometric template course, and I was more going into it skeptically, saying what was so great about this, saying
let's see if I can find out. And I sort of got into it through one hole to eight pole, which had some pretty good photographic evidence, and I posted the results on golf club bat lists and then just started immediately getting feedback from fellow golf nerds, and it was actually very constructive, helpful feedback. I sort of misinterpreted the hole at first. I got some theories from a few people and refined it and put it back until
we thought it was good enough. But just that exposure started to bring photos out of the woodwork, and then I started getting messages and emails, and that really cascaded into resulting enough information to do the whole course. So that took a while, and I had no end data, I had no goal. It was just to get it right. So I would do it for three hours one night,
six hours another night. I'd abandoned for a couple of weeks, and it was just sort of a fun thing to like a three or crossword puzzle, to keep going back. And and the more work I put into it, I would say, the easier it got, because the more everything sort of fit together, and the more feedback I could get from the images and comparing angles and stuff like that, so it got more and more rewarding, which I think
things like this are typically the opposite. They get sort of diminishing returns, but this one sort of got more and more lifelike, like sort of sketching out a portrait and then filling in the details. And I guess the culmination was when and there was a couple of different touch points. Tom do OK contact me and was sort of feeling me out for how accurate it was. I think Andy actually introduced me to Michael Kaiser Jr. And sort of time and.
This would be Andy Johnson that you're referring to Friday Founder.
Yeah. I think he was sort of watching what I was doing. He knew Michael Keser Junr. I really didn't, so a couple different introductions, and then when I presented it again, I didn't really know he was serious about doing it. I was just sort of showing him what it was. But by the end of that meeting he was He seemed very gong on. He's like, yeah, I've been wanting to do this for a long time, or
my father has. I knew that they considered doing it at the band in Dune Side a long time ago, but I thought I thought that would have been neat, And then I thought it would have been pretty neat if they did at stream Song. I know they were, you know, that was kind of like the right environment to do it, sort of a blank slate, but I thought it was dead at this point. So I was doing it for sort of history's sake and my own sake and everyone so they could see what it was like.
And then yeah, when he sort of brought up that it could be a reality, I just got very excited. Yeah, and then that sort of motivated me to then be like, oh man, you know, I should really go back over this thing with a fine tooth comb and make sure it really is what I think because before that, you know, there's some details that you could sort of brush over. But when you know someone's gonna put in the ground, all of a sudden, the review editing phase started and that was pretty heavy.
And what is it that you ended up handing over to Doake's team to guide them, to help guide them in the process of actually reproducing the golf course. Was there like a specific model or digital something that that you gave to them in the end.
Well, then we sort of ran into a little dilemma. It was like, Okay, there's this nice looking rendering of it in a digital environment, but again, it wasn't meant it's not an architectural tool. It's more of a video game, and it was sort of trapped in there. And so the worst case we could have manually sort of measured every point of it and kind of created our own topo.
But that's when Brian Zigger came in, and you know, he he was living up there, he was sort of I sort of think of him as like a tech ninja, and he's very into golf, and you kind of need the fusion of those two interests to be to be
very useful here. And he just had ideas like, I think I know how to get this out of there, and I would say what he did is sort of I don't want to say hacked, but he he figured out that the measuring tool in the game would give a coordinate and a height and could measure a distance. So he sort of figured out that if he did a little macro, he could send this measuring tool off on a multi day journey or however long it took to run the program and it would just go every
foot or every two feet and take a measurement. And he found a way to basically automate a topo system out of that. So that that was big. Tom likes to work with topo, as I think most of the big architects do. You know, some of them may sort of convert more digital going forward, but that that's how they're used to working. And you know, there was a little more to it like they needed to space out a few things for safety and do some other scaling.
But that was basically the delivery on the tech side from my standpoint, was giving the model to Brian and letting him try to extract it. And then from a just a practical work perspective, I created like a like a field level cheat sheet for them where I just basically took everything I knew about each hole, everything that I thought was useful, and sort of typed it up in a document that I don't remember, probably came out to a hundred pages or something like that, and every useful
image I copy and pasted in there. And they I think they reproduced that book. The Brian Schneider and the guys in the field could sort of constantly refer to it and not have to rely on memory or sort of keep coming back to me. So I think that that was good. And then at one point to even set up like a visual hut out there on site that had a bunch of computer monitors and was nice and dark and they could they really needed to look at the finer details they could go in there.
Wow. Okay, now you were talking about something earlier that the builders were using in the field at the Lido something where they could kind of say that as could you tell me a bit more about that. I'm not sure I completely understood that process or what the technology was that they were using. Was it GPS.
It's basically, I guess the way to state it. It really matters on the green contours because you have to be you know, you don't want the wind to change it by a few inches here and there. I would
say the fairway contours matter less. But the basic concept is they could first first they could do a rough draft from the digital model, and they could use GPS dozers to to actually sculpt the land, so they you know, I wasn't there during this, but they piled the stand up and essentially the machine will keep subtracting from it and comparing it to the GPS, and from my understanding, some pretty big machines could get pretty good level of detail from that, Like they could even sort of cover
their own tracks with the scraper or you know however it works. But once they do that, then I'd say, then that's where my model ended and where Tom and Brian Schneider and their artistry comes in. You know, there was a lot of looking at photographs trying to get micro contours. You know, there's some of the greens I had a lot of information, so I didn't have much or I had information, but it was from sort of
strangely the things in the middle of the course. I had less information because we had obliques from the perimeter, so the center of the course was kind of the furthest away And for a few of those we had ground level photos and great info, and a couple were a little murky. And Tom and Brian's interpretation, you know, from having studied the National Golf Links and other courses and the knowledge drainage, you know, they were much better
looking at the photos and interpreting what was happening. So there are a lot of cases where whatever I put in the digital model, especially in the middle of the course, they may have overruled with better evidence, or they may have just gone to a finer level of detail and said, you know, we can see more detail than what was in your model, and so, you know, say they do call it the finish work, and then it's it's a sandy, windy environment out there, and the save ass feature would
be then taking a local GPS station with basically a laser device like a local lid oer device. I think, similar to what the strac aligne guys use for their green maps and all that, and you basically, I don't know. I think it takes fifteen twenty minutes or so. You can laser an entire green complex and then you have it to you know, saying the eighth of an inch of accuracy digitally, so then if if you leave and the wind kind of rearranges it, you can always put
it right back. And that's that's what I'm calling abas future. I don't they probably don't refer to it that way.
And it's probably similar to what architects do. Restoration architects do when they want to like preserve green contours before they kind of take the greens down to the base and rebuild them. Right, if they want to save what the original contours are, they might do use some of this laser scan technology to save that digitally so that they know when they rebuild it, they're rebuilding something that looks more or less like the original functions like it.
Yeah, I believe that was the first use of this technology, and people have been doing that for a while. So yeah, if you had. If you had to take out the thatch layer of a green, you would, you know, and you wanted to preserve the dynamics, you could scan it first, kind of put it under the knife and then make sure that you could put it back if you ever wanted to, or put it back and lower it, or you could do things like, you know, reduce the slopes
by two percent. You could do all sorts of things digitally once you have it scanned.
Were there any particular surprises in the transition from digital to physical, like some holes that just turned out differently than you thought, or had to be altered in the field by the intervention of Brian Schneider and Tom Doak, or holes that were just much better than you imagined. Anything that was just like, hey, this is not quite what I thought it would be now that I'm seeing it in the ground.
Well, there were. First of all, there's there's a million little technicalities like there's you know, I mean, I learned a lot going through this process. Like aerials. You know, you don't you think of them as being straight down, but they're not. They're you know, if you really wanted to to and we skipped a little bit of things we had something called the Anaglyph, which was overlapping survey flight images that we combined during during my modeling phase.
A guy named Craig Disher, who's a golf historian but also a military photo historian, found these back to back aerials pretty high definition. I would say some of the highest definition I've seen for an old course. And he overlapped them and color coded them so I could put on three D glasses and I could look and zoom in and I could see the contours of the course to a pretty high degree. Without that, it was very hard to tell if things were coming up up or down.
You had to really think about the shading a lot. And there was one case on the seventh pole in particular, where there was an entire ledge that I thought went downward, and then once I got that three D image, it was obvious it went upward. And so that was part of that editing process. I got that, you know, sort of midway through is go and make sure every contour
that I sculpted was going the correct direction. But then once I had that, I could I could see that, you know, this screen was about twice as high as the screen, and you could start really sort of comparing scales, but even that had a little skew in it because it wasn't they weren't taken directly over the course. They were taken out an angle, and there was no way to really figure out where exactly in the sky they were.
And we went through a lot of effort with sort of photogrammetry guys to see if we could refine that more and take out the skew, but it was just too difficult without knowing exactly where in the sky those
were taken. So then once Brian started exporting the model for Tom Doak's usage, there were other little errors and SKUs like fish eye lens type skws, all kinds of things, and I would say that an underrated part of what Brian did was sort of recheck everything, you know, make sure that those SKUs didn't make it to the final version. And there was a lot of things that those guys did that I wasn't a part of that I'm sure were very helpful.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and just so different from the normal golf course building process, right what you're describing here, kind of comparing aerials and making sure that the the whatever bias exists in the aerial doesn't make it into the ground. Is maybe not something that golf architects have really considered before unless they're doing like a really ambitious restoration project where a lot has been lost and you know,
needs to be put back on the golf courls. But I'm sure like not to this extent.
Before, and usually those the courses sitting there so you don't worry about the green shift fore feet because of a fish eye lens effect, you can sort of.
Tell or is the slope going up or down? Like you pretty much know, like even if the course has changed a lot. Yeah, like you're not going to have a problem with that.
Now, I think for I mean, I went through a lot of excruciating stuff in the modeling, but they also did after I turned it over, you know, things that
I wasn't a part of. I don't think. Yeah, it probably wasn't the most fun project to do for artists like Tom and Brian and all the other guys, because you know, you're you're really just trying to match what was there, and you know that it was a good enough course that you can't sort of gloss over it and kind of approximate, So you know, everyone is trying to do the best they could to make it perfect within reason, and that's just not a very fun thing
for creative people to do. But I think, you know, Tom likes to challenge and he just viewed it as a challenge I'll show I'll show everyone that I can
do it. But to answer your prior question, you know, surprising things sort of when it went out there, I would just say that I've been to sites before where I've done renderings and I've had the feeling when I got there that, you know, like I've done a rendering completely for an architect or something on the restoration or renovation, and then I've traveled there and I'm like, I really want to see the site because I know it so well digitally and I've had the feeling when I did that.
Then it wasn't really even worthwhile doing because it felt so familiar to me and there were really no surprises, which was weird. But the leado, I would say it was different, and that something about the no trees out there and the scale of it and the sand blown around it just felt definitely epic when I stepped on the actual construction site versus being familiar with it on the model, it just felt bigger, you know, seeing the long view, seeing all eighteen pins. It was a very
weird feeling when you're out there. And I would say the one hole that really struck me it was the fourth hole, the famous channel hole.
The channel hole, yeah, with the alternate fair way essentially in the middle of a lagoon kind of or you can take the longer route around the lagoon.
Right and in the day, it may have been the most famous hole in the world, or one of them, and at least in America. And because of the optional routes and the design being from nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen, I was a little worried that this hole would lose its charm and would feel sort of small and easy. And I guess that was the one very pleasant surprise when I stepped out there, is when I stood on that tee, just felt like all the whole you could
possibly want in the world right now. And then the first time I played it, I'm like, yeah, this thing lives up to the hype. It still still has the dynamics. You still have to think very carefully whether you want to go right or play it safe. The approach out is still daunting. I played it with Hickory maybe the first I don't know, ten rounds out there, and it is a monster. But even with modern clubs, it I think still retains its dynamics.
That's the thing about some of these old courses is that with Hickory's they are especially monsters. Right, the scale of some of these old courses becomes really clear, like the Yale golf course, right, becomes really clear when you start thinking about the how Hickory shots travel. They're really really adventurous. So the Leado, the Wisconsin Ledo, opens this summer, right, that's the debut.
Yeah, it opened for a member event in the fall for two days. So before that members were so playing a nine hole preview round where they would have to do some skipping around. They weren't playing the holes in order. So everyone is very excited in the fall to play it in the correct order, which the routing I think
is for me, it's very comforting. You know, you take one big counterclockwise loop around the property, and so you always know where you are in your round, and every hole you can look left and you can preview the back nine. That was sort of one pleasant surprise from playing it. In order is you have to look over on the alps and see where the pin is, and you're constantly paying attention to what's coming, you know, an hour and a half or two hours in the future,
while you're still trying to concentrate your game. And it's and the way that it's sort of the big rectangle because you keep going around in circles, the wind swaps every few holes, and so it's it's just a really interesting good routing. And I think that the members when they played it in the routing, I think, really start to appreciate that. So it'll open for member play I believe in May, and then resort play I think maybe mid to late June.
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Uh? I don't think so. I mean, I think the there are some that are still in place that are fallow that would be would be interesting. But yeah, there's one el Bo corone that I know. Mike davrees Is you know, has studied a lot. I think he should be the architect for that one.
But that is is that in Michigan since it's Devrees Is it in Michigan.
No, it's it was going to be in South America and it never got built. So yeah, there was a golf course there. Alistair mackenzie traveled down there design and it was going to be like a in a state course. I think it's sixty acres on a pitch that was ahead about one hundred feet in elevate, reversible, basically nine holes that could be played, green complexes that could accept
shots from both ways. It was just a wild, cool design that was lost and they found it I think behind the mirror or something of the house that was the clubhouse on that course that never got repaved with that course. So that's the closest thing I can think to the Leado in terms of something that from the past that you need to find a site to create it, and it would take a lot of study to kind of figure out how to do it accurately because that
one was just a plan. There's things like Ocean Links, you know in Rhode Island, that there's three of the holes that are still sitting there in the ground in a state park that I've kind of had fantasies that maybe maybe the state park would agree to make it a kid's course or something, and it's right next to Newport Country Club and maybe they could leverage their greens keeping staff to take care of it. But you know, realistically,
I don't know if that would ever happen. But I can see the latter and I've reproduced it and it's all just I can see the green contours, it's all just sitting there.
Wow. Yeah, And that's one that Daniel Wexler, who is a historian who has written about a lot of lost golf courses, has written about, right. Ocean Links features in Daniel Wexler. Daniel Wexler's books.
Yeah, and I you know, I read his books a million times, and yeah, I could just I could spend the rest of my life just trying to digitally recreate those and be totally happy, if you know, if I'm retired. But it's so time consuming.
Yeah, well it sounds like it with the lido. So yeah, I mean I think it's it sort of sounds unlikely that a project like this Lido project will happen again.
I mean, this was like sort of a combination of the perfect project to do in this way, right, recover the lido, the perfect owner in Michael Kaiser, the Kaiser family, and an architect who really wanted a challenge, wanted to do something different, wanted to prove something new, and so you know, it's a confluence of factors that's pretty unique. But I can see parts of the process that you've
described being applied elsewhere, and they probably already are. But you know, using GPS dozers, using some of this digital modeling technology to be more precise about what you're doing in the ground, and a lot of it's really intriguing.
A lot of it raises neat possibilities about what can be done with the art of architecture, but also might raise some concerns about how this technology could be applied and whether there will be a temptation on the part of some owners, some golf course developers to take some of the creativity, the human element out of the golf course design process and replace some of it with this you know, kind of automated building, automated modeling, maybe requesting
more and more that golf architects reproduce things that exist elsewhere instead of coming up with their own ideas, and that could kind of set back potentially the art form of golf course architecture, make it less creative, uh, create less room for originality. Have you thought about these issues and are you concerned about them?
I guess I've definitely thought about them. You know, I don't I don't get too worried about people copying courses. I mean, I think they could have already done that, and they have. You know, there's been those like tribute courses and things like that, and they're they kind of have like a bad reputation because they're a lot of times they're not done very well, they're in a different environment, the they're sort of they jump around stylistically, so they're
they kind of come off as gimmicks. You know. There there are a lot of applications that I can think of for these technologies that would be constructive and sort of I would I would say ethical, Like some of the things I've been thinking about, where you know, if you had a ross corse and two of the greens were lost because you know, they built a practice center
or something. You know, there's all kinds of cases like that, and you know they build two new holes or two new holes were put in since then, and they have greens that don't match. You know, is there a way that you could you could sample the closest ross green out there that you can find what those originals were and then maybe go from there. You know, like you think this one was had a little less false front.
You could maybe do some things like that, you know, where you're you're sort of copying the artists, but you're copying the same artists whose work was destroyed. I think that's sort of an interesting concept. Yeah, there's cases where an architect did eighteen holes and nine were lost and a new architect came in, you know, maybe in the fifties or sixties, and put the other nine in and they just don't it doesn't match in the other nine's inferior.
And so what would happen if architect came in, say Langford Moreau, and tried to copy their style for the
missing nine? You know, is that ethical or not? You know, there's cases I think that you may have talked to with Tom Doak about you know, if you're trying to make a Lynxlan in America, do you would it be ethical to go sample some Rumpley Field in Scotland and instead of trying to man make an environment that looks like the wind blew the dunes around, sort of start with that and three D printed on the ground essentially and then go from there. So that's more of the
stuff that interests me. I mean, I think, you know, of course, someone could take the letter from the Old Course, then they could build it in Dubai or something like that, and you know, it would be pretty exact except for the grass types. And you know, but the question is would that be popular? Would would it damage the original? I don't think the original would feel a loss of business or anything like that. So mainly the clubs that
the Frankenstein sort of fears that people have. It's like the Old Course, Augusta National things like that, you know, either things that are the old course flat and sort of reproducible on any sandy site theoretically, or things that are so inaccessible that people kind of have a desire to play because they never will get to play in real life. But but Augusta would be impossible.
I mean, yeah, Augusta is like a bad example because you can't recreate that topography. It would be such a massive earth moving project that it would basically be impossible. But the old course is a better example because it's you know, the grade of that site is pretty much flat. But then you have a lot of really interesting human sized contour, as Gil Hans wants to put it on our podcast, that could potentially be recreated. But you know, you're right that if you recreate that in Dubai, it's
just not going to be the same. I guess my fear isn't so much about the copying of courses, And I actually don't know if I'm afraid about any of this. I'm just trying to come up with potential criticisms or fears that could be had about this. I guess that I could be worried about the slow creep of giving over more and more tasks to technology and taking things off of the plate of humans in the golf course design and especially the building process.
Right.
One of the moves that has happened recently in golf course architecture is that architectural minds have really returned to the field and been out there and created things on their own, you know, and that's brought a lot of craft back to the art form and it's been it's
had a great impact. And so I guess the concern could be, if we automate more forms of that, are we taking some of the humanity out of the process, And would that be a bad thing, because it would clearly be more efficient at some point maybe to have just like you know, not pay for the labor right just to have kind of machines shape the golf course.
But we like having humans shape the golf course, I think, right, We we like that part of the process, and so I guess that could be the concern with us.
I guess. I guess one question would be if the machine could reproduce exactly what a human shaped digitally, does that satisfy your human touch sort of requirement? Yeah, but yeah, I mean I think one way I think I see technology being positive in the golf design industry is on the rendering technology side. I think, you know, I've been near enough to the golf industry to sort of see the dynamics of what's happening, and there's a huge barrier
to entry for architects who haven't made it yet. And I've seen sort of ten wrungs down in the digital golf world. You know, there's these amateur architects who are pumping out, you know, ten courses a month that are terrible. But then there's guys who look like they could be real golf architects, you know, just in this video game space, and they're doing courses that if you saw it, you wouldn't know if they just copied the real world course or if they made it up. And these guys will
spend a lot of time doing that. But I'm just thinking of the big dynamic. You know, these these projects are a lot of money. The the developers are taking a risk on their architect and it makes sense in the grand scheme of things that they go with proven commodities.
And the question I have is if if rendering tech got a lot better and a lot cheaper and more efficient, maybe even partially AI enhanced to make it to make it easier to do, and we can talk about that in a minute, does that lower the barrier of entry to an emerging architect And say a design competition, you know, if they're submitting their plan. Can they instead of saying, Hey, you've never heard of me, here's what it looks like in two D. You know, I really need a chance.
I'm going to try really hard. Instead of saying that, they could say, here's the flyover and it looks photorealistic. If you like what you see, this is what you're going to get. So I think eventually that would be sort of the utopia is that it levels the playing field and that every architect, no matter if they've made it or not, can show their vision and can win sort of based on their vision or not.
Okay, So basically what you're saying is that technology, new technology could make rendering easier, right make you know, producing effective renderings could become less costly and easier. And right now, established architects kind of have a big advantage in that realm because what they can They can hire people to make these great renderings for them, right they have they
have the capital to do that. And if we level the playing field a bit with the rendering process, the new architects could have the advantage that established architects have in presenting their vision for what a golf course could be. Is that the basic argument.
There, I guess. The one nuance is that I would say the established architects not only have the ability to do the expensive renderings, but they also have the reputation. So you know, if you're hiring Gill Hands, you kind of know what he's all about, and you don't have right And.
They have the golf courses. They have like golf courses that you could visit and see, this is a Gill hansk.
Of course, right've proven themselves. If it's a new guy, you're like, you know, I don't know like his I don't know what his design is going to be, and there's there's a big mystery. And ultimately, if you're right in the thirty million dollar check or whatever it is, you just don't want to take that gamble. But maybe if you could see it, and I guess I'm I've
always watched the music industry. I was a musician growing up, and I would say the analogy there is it used to be dominated by big studio production and the record labels would have to make a massive investment, and you know, Metallica or whoever would go into the studio and it would cost what millions of dollars, And as time has gone on, it's flattened, and the home recording technology or the indie studio technology has gotten so good that for
a lower budget you can still produce an album that's indistinguishable. And I think that ultimately allowed more entrance into the field who could get by on talent and not have to sort of get their big random break.
Well, do you think the music industry has become or that music, let's say music as an art form has become better because of that?
I think so, I think it's less. Yeah. I mean, if you are a musical connoiseur, you can go down any genre or rabbit hole right now and it's so deep.
So yeah, there's a lot of it.
I think it is, And you know, there's a lot more low quality, but there's also more high quality. I think there's just more in general, And so for the artists themselves, there's not as big of a barrier to get there. But once you're there, you don't make as much as you used to. You know, it used to be almost like a union. It's hard to get into, but once you're there, you're paid well. And now it's like you can produce an album for nothing. Now, you know,
for five thousand dollars. You can get your music out there, and then you might not do very well. You might you know, you liver or eye on that, but at least you had the chance and at least people can hear your album, whereas in the past you just wouldn't have been able to produce it.
Yeah, and also what we want is we want more kinds of people to be able to enter music or golf architecture. We don't want, you know, just people who have had all the advantages in the world to be able to become part of these professions, because you know, a healthy art form is one that many people can access. And I think we can probably both agree that the barrier for entry to golf architecture is high, not only for you know, people who have gone to landscape design
school or whatever, but for just like everybody. It's hard to imagine trying to become a golf architect. You know, a lot of people try, but very few people really have the opportunity to do so. So I suppose any leveling of the playing field would have to be greeted as something positive. But you're talking about renderings. I'm looking at a rendering here that you put out on your Twitter account, which is n l E Golf no Longer Extant Golf. Is that that what it stands for, no
Longer existing extent. Yeah, n l E underscore Golf really good follows, so I'd recommend it. But I'm looking at a tweet that you sent out a couple of months ago, and let me describe the picture that you've attached this tweet.
All right, So it looks like a you know, a kind of an Eastern United States setting, you know, meadow type setting with with some trees around it, but but more or less open, a nice little you know, rugged rustic fence in the foreground, and a whole sort of unfolding in front of you that just looks beautiful, you know, really naturalistic bunkering, but like in a true way, like truly naturalistic bunkering. Maybe not even sand in these bunkers. They're kind of it's more sort of grassy and varied.
Looks to be like a center line bunker. And you know, you can play out to the left or you can play out to the right, and those are different strategies. And then you've got a beautiful looking green site again, you know, presented in a very kind of hugging the land, natural way and a beautiful looking golf wel just the kind of golf course that I'd like to play, you know, just sort of lay of the land and truly minimalistic.
The tweet that you sent out with it says gentle handshake opening part four shabby sheet conditioning from the two man grounds crew, my ideal first hole. There was a response to this tweet that was simply where, Yeah, which golf course is this? And your response was nowhere just AI rendering with photoshop, trying to experiment with styles. So you produce this with the help of an AI engine, and you've got to tell like, how the hell did you do this? Like, cause it's freaking me out. It
looks obviously for somebody on the on the internet. Yeah, that's maybe not that hard to fool people on the internet, But looking at this, this looks like a like a human made golf hole to me. And so how did you make this?
Yeah? I I mean there's there's sort of an explosion of AIS out there right now. The Chad GPT and all these things are sort of making the news and and in the in the visual world, there's stable diffusion there's mid Journey, there's Dolly two. You know, they keep coming out with upgrades. And the genre I used for this is prompt to image, So you basically give it a prompt any You can tell it anything, and it'll
produce in a series of images. Usually it'll produce like for images, and then you can sort of refine it from there. And I just started experimenting with it and got a little fascin with it. I mean, I think I tweeted a lot of golf holes and I went through kind of got obsessed with it for a few days. And it's weird. It's almost like you're training a dog
when you're using it. You could say, show me a picture of a you just say golf course, bunkers, you know, and it'll show the most boring, robotic sort of golf image and you sort of I guess it's training you too, because you just sort of keep refining your prompts. And I wish I had the prompt for the one you're talking about pulled up. But it may have been something like, you know, World War One battlefield, fallow Barboy or fence
abandoned golf. Yeah, it may have been like a paragraph long description of things that I would just keep adding to my descriptions and seeing what it came up with. And I kind of knew in my mind what I wanted to see. I just kind of had to keep keep sort of tweaking it and tugging and pulling in different directions until it started to produce the kind of thing I wanted to see. So the interesting thing about
that is what is it? What's the end result? And is it something out of my imagination or is it bits and pieces from actual images that the AI was
trained on. And it's really weird. I mean, yeah, you could theoretically design, especially in a flat site, you could design a course kind of using AI images like this to sort of ignite your imagination and you wouldn't have to follow exactly what it tells you, but you could sort of, you know, you could come up with a style that's maybe a little bit different than anyone else's by doing that. And you know, in the music industry
there's there's some AI things like this too. You know, it might produce a baseline or a drum beat and you can tweak it, and I'd say the power of it is sort of a tool for the human imagination. I don't think it ever takes over or it could design a whole course. But I think in the right hands, an architect could sort of use things like this to kind of peak their creativity and make them do things they maybe otherwise wouldn't have done.
What makes you think that this technology couldn't design an entire golf course because what it's done already in this one image that you tweeted out is pretty impressive. And you said it started with the most generic stuff, but you were able to train it to produce something that looks like a human did it? I mean, for all the world, that looks to me like a very nice, sort of artsy presentation of a cool art architectural vision.
And so what makes you think that the technology won't advance to the point where one of these engines could just kind of churn out golf courses with the right prompts.
Well, so I think it could. I mean, I think it's very realistical. I could. The question would be is that better than what a human could do? And I think that's where I don't. I think we're a long way away. I think one interesting thing about golf courses is an AI a lot of times. There's like a I guess you could call it like a fitness function, you know, like neural networks and genetic algorithms and all
these things. I'm simplifying to a great degree. But they'll they'll kind of evolve and they'll try everything and they switch the waitings, and it's a it's a constant cycle of mutating and then getting tested against like a measurement and simplified ways, at least in genetic algorithms, it sort
of acts like evolution. Like the ones that are most successful you then mutate and you run them through again, and you keep you know, you do this millions of times or however many, and it produces something that's pretty good at what it does. But for golf course, the question is, it's not like a measure able outcome, so you can't like, you can't say, okay, this algorithm just is ten percent better at producing a golf course on
that one. You know, it produced the golf course that met all the constraints that you programmed in and it's satisfied them all, but it might be terrible. And when I started thinking about this before our conversation here, I was thinking about all the constraints that are involved in a golf course, and it's I could go on and on. It's like, you know, where do you want to start? Do you want returning nines? What's the soil type? You know,
how hard do you want it to play? For a range of handicaps, the walks between the tea's, you got where the sun is in the morning, in the afternoon, you got the prevailing winds. You know. I just started listening those. I'm like, I could list hundreds of constraints that I keep using Tom Oak just because I know you guys talk to him a lot, but these things. You know, the human brain is still miles ahead of a supercomputer in terms of being able to synthesize all
this information and be creative. And you know, and Tom Doak and other architect's brains are like a supercomputer, but they've also had the experience, and they have the ability to communicate with the developer. And it's too wide ranging. I mean, I think if AI ever does can do a golf course, it's more satisfactory to human than what a human can do. I think it means that we've reached the point where computers have kind of taken over they.
I don't know, if you're familiar with the concept of the singularity, it's like, what you know, that's like the tipping point when there's no going back, when AI is sort of surpassed. I think that's the point we need to get to, when when uh an AI is the best golf course designer. I think until then, it's it's tools, it's prompts. It's like, hey, you know, it's mashing up like with my prompt it's mash up a World War
One battlefield with golf courses and its training database. And AIS are very good at mashing things up in copying styles. But ultimately it's still derivative to some extent. It's not coming up with like an original idea.
Yeah, and that prompt World War one battlefield to me, it looks like a Civil war battlefield, but World War one battlefield. I guess you're maybe thinking of trenches and things like that. But that in itself is a kind of creative inspiration, right to put a golf course together
with that kind of environment. And so clearly there is a human impulse of creativity that enabled the AI engine to produce something that wasn't generic, that didn't feel like it had been done a million times before because you decided to put two things together that you wouldn't think would belong together World War one battlefield and golf course. And that is like the thing that maes have a really hard time imitating about humans is the ability to
put things like that together to create something new. But you know, I'm sure that at some point the AI will get to a point where it's doing a lot of this stuff really well. I mean, like one thing that I thought of that an AI probably could do. I don't know of any particular product that does anything like this, but I would just imagine that it could
do this. What if you could like feed a topo map into an AI and it could produce for you a bunch of different versions of a routing of an eighteen hole golf course or a nine hole golf course, and essentially you would kind of choose from among those routings. But it would take out that part of the process where the architect kind of has to figure out what's reasonable, what fits, you know, where the golf course can go, and eliminate a bunch of possibilities in order to get
something closer to what the actual routing will be. I would imagine that an AI could do that more efficiently than a human if you found the right constraints for it, that an AI could probably do that pretty well.
So the in the golf club program which is now two K twenty three PGA tour, it can do that. So it can produce a randomized landform, and you can set how extreme you want the hills and how much water and all kinds of other things, and it'll produce an eighteen hole routing for you if you want it. You know, most people use that the first couple of times use a product and then they do their own.
So it can do it. And you know, when you think about the programming necessary to make it do that, or if you had to do your own program to do that, there are still a lot of constraints, you know, like we're talking about how far is the maximum except the bowl walk between green and tea. What's the maximum slope of golfers should be expected to go up and down? What's fun? Like I said, the sun, the wind, all that, Where are the wetlands, where are the no go areas?
You got safety concerns with how close you want the fairways and I think when I was thinking about this before, I call my ultimate conclusion is that the the routing is not really the bottleneck in the golf design industry. Like it's true that you could make a machine ultimately to do it more efficient, but that may only save a very good architect a couple of days and then they may always be questioning it. And then one other thing I was thinking about is there's been some discussions
I think on your podcast. I've been listening to you guys a lot as I've had to do a lot of driving recently, so it can you give me a lot of.
That, But we're good for that. We're good for long drives.
Yeah, and now I realize it makes drives go by a lot quicker. But there's I guess there's been an interesting conversation to me between fairness in golf and a golfer's ability to accept something that's maybe unfair. If it was a natural part of the landscape, like on a links course, rather than a man made feature, it could
be the same exact feature. And if you know it was natural and that old Tom Morris had to route right over it, it's for some reason you deal with it more than if you know that, you know the architect stuck it in there to screw you over.
It feels like a gimmick. If it's human made, it feels like it feels like a gimmick, right, And you can assign it to a person who just screwed you over, as opposed to just saying, hey, that's nature, human versus nature. My understanding of that is that sometimes nature wins.
Yeah, you're blaming God or you know whatever in one and the other you're blaming the architect. And I think the next wrong down is if it's an ai knob stuck right in front of the green, I think that would just infuriate people. So I think I think that's the human element too, is that people? I think I think people when they're playing golf course, Yeah, they either want it to be natural or they want it to be an artist that has done it. I think beyond that,
it starts to get in people's head a bit. And you know, there is a little bit of golf. I was thinking about what a what a golf course is, and you know, it's it's functional art obviously, but some people viewed more as a racetrack. And that's kind of how they were or an obstacle course, and that's kind of how they were getting very standardized courses in the Victorian age. And there's another extreme that's more like fashion, you know. It's like you see bunker styles come and
go and and things like that. It's not and this is what I was talking about with the fitness function. There's no right answer for a golf course. So I think people do you want there to be an artist behind it? Ultimately? I think they want to view it as a human art form.
I would hope. So I think that the personality of a golf architect comes out in the courses, at least in really good courses, and that there is a human dimension there that is inextricable from the pleasure that you might take in a golf course. It's kind of like an artist plus nature, and in the best golf courses you can really see that interaction, that collaboration between human and nature, and that just strikes me as essential. So I think that's a really good point. You've talked me
off the ledge, so thank you. I no longer feel like we're at that Battlestar Galactica moment where the cylons are about to you know, take everything down and the golf course design is never going to be the same. But it does sound like these tools digital AI are having an effect on golf course design that they're going to start changing things very soon, and it's going to be a really interesting story to track. So I appreciate you coming on the podcast, Peter. This was really really interesting.
People should follow you at Nlee Underscore Golf, on Twitter anywhere else people can kind of follow your thoughts about golf course design.
No, I'm not much of an instagrammer, so that's about it.
Yeah, me neither. I don't. I don't. It seems like, actually you're you. You would be kind of suited to Instagram even you know, and kind of the visuals that you do. But I just I don't get that platform. I think I'm too old. I think that's what it what it is.
I don't like. Uh. I know there's a way to do it from your computer, but yeah, I don't like posting for my phone. So that's when it comes up.
Very true. Okay, all right, well, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
All right, take care of.
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