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There's a lot of nonsense prediction engines that show up during big sporting events, usually animal based. Whether it's an elephant eating this over that, or an octopus that goes for that fish over this one, it's all pretty random and any real correct predictions are likely based on the luck of a 50/50 choice. However, can the same be said for Microsoft's digital assistant Cortana? Or at least, the Bing prediction engine behind her, which has drummed up 14 correct predictions in a row for the final rounds of the World Cup.
With Argentina's victory over The Netherlands, the Bing engine tallied up another correct prediction, continuing on from its originally quite controversial decision that Brazil would lose to Germany. However it didn't predict such a drubbing as was dished out by the East European side, as Cortana won't be drawn on scores, merely predicting the overall outcome.
So who does Cortana think will win the world cup overall? Germany.
You can only check out the live prediction yourself if you're based in the US unfortunately, as that seems to be where the prediction tool is being trialled. Attempting to visit it from the UK, tells you that it isn't available in my region yet.
Proxies are a possibility of course, but then again, the easiest way is just to keep an eye on the Twitter feed of Marcus Ash, group manager for Cortana on Windows Phone, as he's been tweeting Cortana predictions like a proud dad.
Bing/Cortana comes up with its predictions using a variety of statistics. It takes into account previous win/loss ratios of teams and individual players, home field advantage, playing surface, game-time weather conditions and predictions from betting outlets.
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KitGuru Says: This is quite an impressive achievement. Could analytical predictions like this cause problems for competitions like the World Cup in the future? What if it reaches a point one day where all sporting outcomes are determined before anyone even steps on the field?
Image Source: Sudharsen
This is just a matter of probability. Cortana might be right 1,000,000 times in a row, but overall predictions can never be 100% accurate, especially when there is a human element in the equation. In sports, psychology plays a major factor in determining the outcome of a game, whether positive or negative. This aspect, among others, cannot be predicted by a prediction engine (or whatever they are using Cortana for). Klose might have a cramp in his toe, Messi might have eaten bad fish the night before… who knows. These elements cannot be included as variables in a mathematical equation… See my point?
They can be integrated as variables. Any information can.
Just that we can’t really have acces to it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Interesting. Thanks for the link.
What I find hard to understand, though admitting my ignorance on the subject matter, is how can human psychology be modeled from a mathematical perspective. The emotional outcome triggered by an event can be infinite. As an extreme example, the death of a person might cause sadness to one, a neutral reaction to another and perhaps happiness to others… (that sounds sick but some people are!) and so on… So from that assumption, how can a predicted outcome be accurate 100%? In my example, there can be three outcome possible, so the probability of being correct lessens to 33.33…%
Just a thought.
Kit Guru – Germany is NOT Eastern European, it is Central European.