The Future of Golf Equipment

What Callaway’s Dr Alan Hocknell doesn’t know about golf club design isn’t worth knowing. The man with a rather appropriate PhD in Collisions has been with Callaway for 22 years and is now the head of product development for clubs and balls. His team of 120 skilled engineers is now responsible for creating some of the most innovative products to make their wayon to the course.

Hocknell is also one of the driving forces behind Callaway’s groundbreaking use of artificial intelligence, which is employed to great effect in the latest Mavrik range of woods and irons. It’s just another example of the brand’s out-of-the-box thinking, which allows it to make some of the best-performing products on the market.

What made you go down the route of artificial intelligence when it came to research and development and what are the advantages of using it?

We’ve been working on building our simulation and analysis capability for quite some time. We can build detailed models of the driver in the computer and we can simulate the impact of the ball. But we wondered if there was a way to refine that process, taking the computer and teaching it how to learn to design golf clubs. We thought it might actually come up with some answers that were different to the ones we were thinking of. So we hired some more people, took an in-house approach and worked out how to take our core simulation capability and add it to this AI engine that allowed the computer to essentially do it for itself.