Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A.I. accurately predicted the full baseball post-season back in July

marketwired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 71 posts

Re: A.I. accurately predicted the full baseball post-season back in July

#31

Post by bluetwo »

no_protocol wrote: post #10

Nothing about this seems to add up. They claim they made the prediction in early July, but link to a newspaper article dated 4 August that indicates the predictions were made just one day earlier. They picked the team with the best record all season long to win the championship. They got one of the division winners wrong. Just publishing the current favorites from MLB.com's probability page [0] as of 3 August would h…

According to the article:

"A group of Boston Globe readers accurately predicted nine of baseball’s 10 playoff teams after participating in a 30-minute online experiment using Unanimous A.I.’s Swarm Intelligence on Aug. 3."

So they don't credit the AI as much as the readers. I agree it is all fishy. Someone trying to pump up the value of their company.

Re: A.I. accurately predicted the full baseball post-season back in July

#32

Post by FonzieBear »

fleitz wrote: post #17
no_protocol wrote: post #10

Nothing about this seems to add up. They claim they made the prediction in early July, but link to a newspaper article dated 4 August that indicates the predictions were made just one day earlier. They picked the team with the best record all season long to win the championship. They got one of the division winners wrong. Just publishing the current favorites from MLB.com's probability page [0] as of 3 August would h…

There's also the issue of the full suite of predictions, if these were the only predictions made then it's impressive, but if they made lots of predictions then some of their predictions coming true may be no better than chance.

Well, The Boston Globe only made the one set of predictions.

Re: A.I. accurately predicted the full baseball post-season back in July

#33

Post by 1024core »

Cortexia wrote: post #28
Tangokat wrote: post #7

Not to be overly critical but: It does not match my definition of A.I: "UNU enables groups of online users to think together as a unified emergent intelligence -- a "brain of brains" that can express itself as a singular entity. Touted to as the world's first "hive mind," the UNU platform has had over 60,000 human participants in swarming sessions this year, together answering over 250,000 questions." Also I would re…

Except this was a prediction that was done formally for the Boston Globe, at their request. You can see their article about it here: https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/redsox/2016/10/04/group-g...

Still, this is not "AI" in the traditional sense of the phrase. Asking a bunch of humans and then deciding an outcome is not AI.

Re: A.I. accurately predicted the full baseball post-season back in July

#35

Post by CapacitorSet »

sixhobbits wrote: post #16

This reminds me of one of the chapters from "How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking" by Jordan Ellenberg (highly recommended). He describes how "stock brokers" would send out a "free stock prediction" to thousands of email addresses. The prediction would be a simple up/down prediction for a specific stock. The prediction was randomly chosen. But these "brokers" would send an equal number of up and do…

If anyone is interested, this is known as p-hacking in statistics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging), and works in a similar way.

For instance, you have a statistical population of one hundred men and one hundred women: you collect as much data as possible about them - as many features as possible, actually - until you find something which happens to be statistically significant for your group (eg. salt consumption). Then, you publish your results, pretending that the feature you found was the original hypothesis for the study ("Our study confirms that salt consumption is higher in males.")

Re: A.I. accurately predicted the full baseball post-season back in July

#36

Post by amperexorange »

1024core wrote: post #33
Cortexia wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except this was a prediction that was done formally for the Boston Globe, at their request. You can see their article about it here: https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/redsox/2016/10/04/group-g...

Still, this is not "AI" in the traditional sense of the phrase. Asking a bunch of humans and then deciding an outcome is not AI.

Well, I think it's pretty clearly an "emergent intelligence" that is distinct from any of the individuals' unique intelligence.

In other words, whose intelligence is being represented by the swarm?

Re: A.I. accurately predicted the full baseball post-season back in July

#37

Post by posterboy »

Someone wrote: post #4
joshagogo wrote: post #2

Who does the A.I. say will win the election next week?

http://unu.ai/election-infographic/

I'd prefer not to have to go to click a link, seeing that you were replying and could've just included the info.
Post reply on HN