Live data from Hacker News

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

marketwired.com

51–60 of 71 posts

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

#51

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…

This technique was also described on The Simpsons: http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Professor_Pigskin

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

#52
I'd be curious to know what else they predicted that turned out to be wrong. This could be an impressive run, or it could be that the company's press release highlights several victories and omits several (or more) failures.

I have no evidence one way or the other but would be interested to see more context.

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

#53

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…

They predicted the Kentucky Derby (Superfecta) using this same A.I., based on a challenge from another reporter: http://www.newsweek.com/artificial-intelligence-turns-20-110...

It probably would be more useful if you disclose your connection to the company, and then gave us some technical arguments.

At the moment your comment history doesn't make a great argument, eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11663155

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

#54

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…

But this isn't that at all. 1. They made the predictions well before hand and released them to the public. 2. As the article stated, they also did the same thing with Hockey, Derby, and Academy Awards.

If there were an extremely large number of AI's making all those predictions publicly in advance, so many that one might randomly do that well, then the comment would be accurate. But that does not appear to be the case.

There was absolutely SOME luck involved, however, because I don't believe that, for instance, there is zero randomness in the World Series, which would have to be the case if one could absolutely predict it accurately.

[UPDATE: to be clear, I'm assuming that Unanimous didn't make thousands of similarly high-level predictions, and then only report the ones that did well. I think that's a reasonable assumption, because there aren't thousands of high-level predictions on the level of the Oscars and World Series.]

[UPDATE 2: I just registered at the site. It appears that many people can ask the same question, many times. The same question looks like it can be asked, in fact, many thousands of times. If they were simply cherry-picking the one answer out of thousands that was correct, then this is p-hacking. However, the press release is listing questions asked by prominent entities such as Newsweek and TechRepublic. There aren't all that many of such entities asking such questions of UNU. So the water is a little murky, but it still looks like UNU is doing something impressive.]

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

#56

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…

"The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other." — Sir Francis Bacon

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

#57

UNU seems to get their press releases on here a lot. As far as I can see there's not much "AI" involved, just a UI over the "wisdom of crowds" method of making predictions. In this case, the Cubs were heavily favored all season to win the World Series, had arguably one of the best GMs and managers in baseball, and a raft of all-star players. Goat aside, it was fairly smart money to lean towards them from mid-season o…

Agreed - predicting that the Cubs would win the world series isn't impressive - the majority of SI writers [4/7] did that at the beginning of the season: http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/03/31/playoff-picks-awards-picks-...

Correctly predicting who would advance in the post season is mostly luck.

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

#58
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So could you. Would have made others like you happier.

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

#59
post #13

Has Unu made any incorrect predictions? Their blog only seems to cover the big, successful ones.

In response to such skepticism, reporters come up with their own questions and ask UNU to make predictions. And the reporters monitor the process. That's what this set of picks is - it was done for the BOSTON GLOBE, at their request, with their own participants: https://www.bostonglobe.com/sports/redsox/2016/10/04/group-g...

That doesn't actually answer the question.

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

#60

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…

Here is a modern version of the same scam [0], using social media accounts and deleting the wrong predictions while the account is set to private.

[0] https://medium.com/message/how-to-always-be-right-on-the-int...

Post reply on HN