LONDON — The All England Club, somewhat ironically, is blaming “human error” for a glaring mistake by the electronic system that replaced human line judges this year at Wimbledon.The CEO of the club, Sally Bolton, said Monday that the ball-tracking technology was “inadvertently deactivated” by someone for three points at Centre Court during Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova’s three-set victory over Sonay Kartal a day earlier in the fourth round. On one point, a shot by Kartal clearly landed past the baseline but wasn’t called out by the automated setup — called Hawk-Eye — because it had been shut off.Bolton declined to say who made the mistake or how, exactly, it occurred or whether that person would face any consequences or be re-trained. She did note that there were other people at fault: the chair umpire, Nico Helwerth, and two who should have let him know the system was temporarily down — the review official and the Hawk-Eye official.“We didn’t need to put line judges back on the court again,” Bolton said. “We needed the system to be active.”Not really. But like most big tennis tournaments nowadays — the French Open is one notable exception — Wimbledon has replaced its line judges with cameras that are supposed to follow the balls on every shot to determine whether they land in or out.There are those, particularly in the British media, who keep referring to this as part of the ever-increasing creep of AI into day-to-day life, but Bolton objected to the use of that term in this case.“The point I would want to emphasize — and perhaps contrary to some of the reporting we’ve seen — is it’s not an artificial intelligence system. And it is electronic in the sense that the camera-tracking technology is set up to call the lines automatically, but it requires a human element to ensure that the system is functional,” Bolton said. “So it is not AI. There are some humans involved. And in this instance, it was a human error.”Russia’s Pavlyuchenkova was one point from winning a game for a 5-4 lead in the first set against Britain’s Kartal on Sunday when a shot by Kartal landed long. But there was no ruling from Hawk-Eye.After a delay, Helwerth decided the point should be replayed, which Pavlyuchenkova thought showed bias toward an opponent …
