Comment by biggestdummy

They do, in fact, have humans who check to make sure that everyone starts behind the starting line. And both humans and computers which check to make sure that nobody starts early. Two notes on "starts early." One - start is any visible bodily movement, not the crossing of the start-line. So any flinch, whether in the direction of the start-line or not, is a false start. Two - if you start inside of 0.1 seconds of the start-gun, it is declared a false start, since the assumption is that no human can react faster than that. The precision at the start is quite high!