Artificial Intelligence (AI) sometimes gets a bad press, but we’ve found it extremely useful for a variety of tasks at our athletics club, Vale of York Athletic Community. Here’s a brief overview of how we’re using it to help plan our FMC (Funetics Multi Challenge) competition on 27 June at the University of York.
Scheduling an event timetable for an athletics meeting can undoubtedly be a complex task. It’s even more challenging if you’ve never done it before, as we hadn’t.
England Athletics provide a helpful club guide including an example timetable for anyone wanting to put on an FMC meet, which covers event sequencing, group sizes and timings. But our specific challenge was adapting EA’s morning timetable to an afternoon slot, with our own particular athlete numbers and group structure.
We fed the EA guidance document and our requirements into Claude, and it produced the Master Timetable for our meet you can see below. A handful of revisions later — mainly adjusting buffer times and the long jump duration whilst compensating for some inconsistencies in the original document — we had a print-ready schedule in a total of fifteen minutes.
