In a classic start-up setting -- in a former textile plant four miles from where the first hockey match was played a century and a half ago -- a group of high-tech computer engineers are changing Canada's most revered pastime. There -- in sterile cubicles amid lots of wood and windows, with a jelly-bean dispenser and the inevitable dog, all planted in a gentrifying Jewish section of Montreal where Mordecai Richler set his landmark 1970 novel "St. Urbain's Horseman" -- they examine the 4,000 motions they detect players make in the course of each 60-minute game. The result is millions of data points unavailable to fans in the stands, but indispensable for coaches and, ultimately, players. The work being done here is changing the world of sport.

Generating a schedule for a professional sports league is an extremely demanding task. Good schedules have many benefits for the league, for example higher incomes, lower costs and more interesting and fairer seasons. This paper presents a successful solution method to schedule the Finnish 1st division ice hockey league. The solution method is an improved version of the method used to schedule the Finnish major ice hockey league. The method is a combination of local search heuristics and evolutionary methods. An analyzer for the quality of the produced schedules will be introduced. Finally, we propose a set of test instances that we hope the researchers of the sports scheduling problems would adopt. The generated schedule for the Finnish 1st division ice hockey league is currently in use for the season 2008-2009.