https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKNVwXU2rrI
This is misleading. It's just Wisdom of the Crowd stuff. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd)
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.
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.
And, if anyone else has a winning Superfecta ticket, I haven't seen it. So, it's not like this was some easy pick.
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.
If you read the CEO's statement in the original article, he wasn't claiming omniscience, but that horse-racing was certainly difficult to predict.
The better question is not, "will they hit the Preakness Superfecta?" but, how do UNU's picks do against the average guy at the track?
I'd bet they're pretty dang good.
NEWSWEEK challenged them to predict the Oscars and they outperformed over 90% of the experts, including 538.
Here is the NEWSWEEK article: http://www.newsweek.com/oscar-predictions-artificial-intelli...
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.
