The DRS' in-built safety mechanism

During the second Test in Dubai, Shan Masood was hit on the heel by a Trent Boult inswinger and was given out. Somewhat disgruntled, as people with sore heels often are, Shan asked for a review and waited for justice to take its course.

Television viewers sat through a series of replays showing ball heading past leg stump. The decision was clearly going to be overturned, thought everyone. But then Hawk-Eye had a go. It showed the same ball heading in the same not-out direction, but then, a split second after impact, projected it veering dramatically to the right, performing a perfect figure of eight, and hitting Masood's middle stump half way up.

This isn't the first time that a DRS-aided dismissal has looked a little wonky, the most famous example occurring during a certain World Cup semi-final. But in the case of Ajmal and the Laws of Physics versus Tendulkar, the DRS-operators attempted to bluff it out. "There is nothing wrong with our system," they said, and then, when pressed, they said, "THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH OUR SYSTEM!" in a louder voice.

But this time, they have ditched denial in favour of a dash of honesty and a homespun tale of plausible excuses. Apparently, this latest blooper was all down to camera angles, frame rates, and inadequate feng shui at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium, which resulted in Hawk-Eye's chakras becoming blocked.

The truth, however, is more surprising than this fiction. Hawk-Eye, and DRS as a whole, was explicitly designed to do this sort of thing. And with good reason.

We humans are naturally conservative. We don't like change, and we are deeply suspicious of machines, particularly machines we don't understand, which is to say, most of them.

Even the brainiest people on the planet are not entirely sure that the Terminator films were definitely fictional. If Professor Stephen Hawking is worried about artificial intelligence taking over the planet and wiping us all out, imagine what levels of anti-machine paranoia exist amongst the general populace.

The architects of DRS knew this, which is why they augmented their system with the Onfield Organic Personification Software or OOPS, a top-secret program designed to mirror the random inefficiency of the human being.

For example, to recreate the effect of a really good post-lunch yawn on an umpire's concentration, HotSpot regularly fails to pick up anything between 1:40 and 1:50 pm. Snickometer has a "stone deaf" setting, which means it occasionally doesn't notice a nick that was audible to people outside the stadium, and one in a thousand slow-motion replays are deliberately blurred to reproduce the effect of the umpire having accidentally taken his reading glasses out into the middle.

Masood was unfortunate to have been on the wrong end of it this time, but instead of criticising the DRS designers, we should be grateful to them, both for keeping the authentic umpiring experience alive in a digital age, and for helping to keep us safe from killer cyborgs for a little while longer.