Human creativity is the elixir that's powered civilisations down the ages. It's brought us untold breakthroughs in all sectors of the economy, from agriculture to healthcare, energy to mobility. Our imagination continues to be our saviour as the world's ageing population faces tough socioeconomic and environmental challenges. Imagination entails creating mental models of things that don't yet exist. This kind of innovation brought us the printing press, the steam engine, the light bulb, the telephone, the aeroplane, the TV and the PC.

Conjuring up unique ways to test the limits of the body through sport is about the most human exercise that people can engage in. That's exactly why artificial intelligence is joining in on the fun. Design firm AKQA says that it has introduced the world's first-ever sport designed by artificial intelligence which it calls, 'speedgate.' The game, according to the firm, was created by feeding rules from 400 different sports into a neural network and letting a computer combine them based on three key factors. Players work in teams to pass a rugby training ball through three'gates.'

Many existing sports have their roots in hundreds (if not thousands) of years of human tradition. But what if you asked computers to create a sport? You now know how that can turn out. The design agency AKQA has introduced Speedgate, reportedly the first sport envisioned by an AI. The event has six-player teams competing on a field with three open-ended gates.

At TechCrunch, we write about AI all the time, whether the technology is being used to write books, make films or create a better McDonald's drive-thru. But here's one we haven't heard before: using AI to invent a new sport. The sport in question is Speedgate, and it was developed by AKQA. Creative Director Whitney Jenkins explained that the digital agency wanted to do something "really ambitious" for Portland Design Week, and given the team's work with Nike (and its general "love of sports or athleticism"), it made sense to ask: "What if we invented the next basketball, the next football?" To do that, AKQA says it used an existing recurrent neural network architecture, feeding it data about 400 sports, which were then used to generate sports concepts and rules.