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The computer is only used to draw-up the final design, to clean it up and to make it look really sharp. Incidentally, that is why, in our office, we never actually design a golf course directly on the computer. Computer plans can sometimes appear ‘cold’ and ‘aloof’, especially when they aren’t very detailed. A hand-drawn plan, while perhaps not as accurate or ‘perfect’, certainly has a much warmer and artistic look to it. But for me, being born before the age of personal computers, nothing can substitute the all-important and old-friend feel of a pen in my hand. Perhaps our children will be more comfortable with a mouse in their hand instead of a pen. That’s not the computer’s fault though, just a personal preference as a result of habit. However, ‘free-handing’, for me at least, is still much easier to do with the old pen and paper. In fact, you can literally ‘free-hand’ a drawing, moving your mouse around your screen as you would a pen, and that’s what the computer will show. If you want to draw a rugged bunker edge, for example, it will help you there as well. So, let me emphasize that a computer will show a ‘graceful-curve’ only if you draw it yourself. But that is, of course, the seed of another computer-related myth: a course that is so-called ‘Computer Designed’ will be an orgy of nothing but graceful curves – save perhaps a few geometric figures – with little variety in the resulting shapes of the course’s features and certainly nothing rugged or truly natural-looking. Or, more accurately, they can ‘graceful-curve’ you to death. And golf course features are not aircraft engines: they don’t need to be designed with microscopic accuracy.įortunately, computers can also free-hand you to death. But as we all know, golf courses – quite thankfully – don’t have geometric shapes or straight lines. Now this is great stuff, and can make drawing such things as roads and residential development a breeze. Zoom-in until you can see the electrons flying around the atom core, and then you’ll see that the (perfectly straight) line has arrived smack at the centre of that core. I don’t care how much you want to zoom in to see if it missed its mark by a zillionth of a millimetre. Draw a triangle from A to B to C and back to A again, and it will hit those points on the button time-and-time again. You won’t ever see the computer sneeze it the middle of an operation and draw up a circle that 5.000000000001 meters in diameter. Tell it to draw a circle that’s 5 metres in diameter, and that’s what you get. These are all done with mathematical accuracy. As well as squares, pentagons, arcs, or any other geometric shape you can imagine. And straight lines are not the only trick they can do. These machines, when told, will draw a line from the infamous point A to its always-second-fiddle-cousin point B with ruthless speed and, literally, mathematical accuracy. Ironically, probably the seed of one of the many computer related myths is the fact that computers will straight-line you to death.
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Let’s look at each of these two important items separately. They are:Ģ- Drawing conclusions about those things. As of today, computers are still incapable of designing a bunker.īut this is where the comparisons of computers to a pen should end, because a computer can accomplish the following two main tasks, while a pen can only do parts of the first. Thankfully, that is no truer than a drawing being a result of the pen rather than of the artist. In other words, that the design becomes more a product of the computer and less one of the individual. Specifically – and what it really boils down to – many assume that Computer Assisted Design (from which is derived the infamous acronym CAD) really means Computer Designed. Well, they’re not so much myths as they are mis-understandings, or not-understandings-at-all. Yet rather than fall victim to the oft-repeated myths surrounding the use of computers in golf course design, we should instead take a closer look at this subject, perhaps in the hopes of drop-kicking some of these myths the way of the orange-coloured golf ball. Or, to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s description of the game of golf – but in regards to the use of computers in the field of golf course architecture – these machines certainly seem to be ‘tools ill-suited for the purpose’. However, such a discussion may allow us to look upon this long misunderstood tool in a different way.Īt first thought, computers certainly would seem to be quite at odds with the cherished qualities found in the raw and unique landscapes of the world’s best golf courses. It may seem brazen to discuss computers and their influence on golf course architecture on a web-site seemingly so openly devoted to any and all things traditional.