When 'artificial intelligence' is the same thing as 'crowdsourcing and averaging'...<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKNVwXU2rrI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKNVwXU2rrI</a><p>This is misleading. It's just Wisdom of the Crowd stuff.
(<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd</a>)
This was a derby where the top horses finished in the exact order they were favored. Nyquist went off at 2-1, which by Derby standards is a huge favorite. Exaggerator finished second, and was 5-1. Gun Runner finished third at 10-1. Mohaymen finished 4th at 12-1.<p>This almost NEVER happens in the Kentucky Derby, which is known for being a wildly unpredictable race. They simply bet "the chalk" (gambling slang for favorites), which by definition is the crowdsourced results, since odds are determined by the relative bets placed by the public. They could have looked at the top 5 horses (there was one other horse at 12-1), bet them in order of odds for $2, and come up with the same result. The only reason the winning ticket was worth so much is because of the insane amount of money bet on this race.<p>Prediction: Next year's 'crowdsourced' prediction will closely match how the betting shakes out, and it will fail, because that's how horse racing works. Now, if they can come up with results that are profitable over time for a large amount of races, then I'll start to be impressed.
This is a completely irrelevant achievement. Nobody can reasonably expect this to be repeatable, and if enough people make predictions somebody will get it right.<p>It's so blatantly irrelevant, I assume this company only cares about selling and not at all about their technology being able to do anything better than chance.
The derby has 20 horses in the competition. Winning the superfecta requires picking the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th places in correct order.<p>The possible ways to choose that ordering are 20 * 19 * 18 * 17 or 116,280 combinations. So, a 1 in 116,280 chance of winning (which is why it pays about 11,000x -- bookies get to keep the rest!). If this crowd-sourced horse pickin' works twice that would be about 1 in 13.521 billion odds. So, if it can do it twice there might be something to it. Doing it once isn't really that big of odds. If the favorite gets upset (Nyquist this time) then the crowdsource probably loses. Not sure how often that happens, but it probably isn't particularly rare.
Psychologically speaking no one gives a crap whether this is "really AI" or not. There are a lot of people who will hear about this and get very excited about learning computers. This is a big deal (regardless of what's actually in the box.)
No, this is not repeatable to nail the Superfecta of the Kentucky Derby (or pick a perfect March Madness bracket for that matter). The point is that this platform seems to outperform the experts. And every once in a while, they might nail it perfectly.