The original research was done with teenaged tennis players in an academy in Houston, Texas. They spent about two hours every day on after-school lessons and practice. Their basic hitting skills were good; in fact, one of the participants was state-ranked. What they lacked was experience. In tennis, experience manifests itself in the ability to understand what the opponent will do next, and understand it instinctively. Pete Sampras or Andre Agassi does not stop to consider where the other will hit the ball, they know from years of playing. During that time, their brains took in billions of bits of data that are slowly matched, measured, rejected, or chunked. Eventually they could tell, through countless nuances in body language, what to expect.
For the research, participants were divided randomly into two groups. The control played video games at a computer for about half an hour; the experimental group used the AEL software for about the same length of time. The word "about" refers to the fact that students used the AEL software until it became "too easy," meaning they had absorbed all the experiential information they could.
