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Can Wolfram Alpha Tell Which Team Will Win the Super Bowl?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Which football team will win the Super Bowl this weekend? That's a multi-million-dollar question, given the amount of cash people will bet on either the Seattle Seahawks or the Denver Broncos to win. Fortunately, Wolfram Alpha (the self-billed "computational knowledge engine") can analyze the historical statistics for both teams and throw out some potentially useful numbers. Developed by Stephen Wolfram and based his Wolfram Research's Mathematica analytical platform, Wolfram Alpha is an altogether different search engine from Bing or Google, which generally return pages of blue hyperlinks in response to queries. Instead of multiple results leading to still other Webpages, Wolfram Alpha usually returns set of definitive, numerical answers. (A lengthy rundown of the engine's capabilities is found on its 'About' page.) So how does Wolfram's engine, which features sophisticated algorithms chewing through trillions of pieces of data, break down the potentials for Sunday's game? Out of the 38 times the two teams have met on the field, the Broncos have triumphed 25 times (versus 12 wins for the Seahawks), scoring 98 total touchdowns to the Seahawks' 84. It's definitely advantage Broncos, in that sense. But the teams' percentages are fairly close with regard to total yardage, penalties, penalty yards, and other metrics, although the Seahawks have managed to nab more interceptions (47, versus the Broncos' 37). But while Wolfram Alpha can crunch all the historical data it wants, and that data can suggest one team will likely triumph over another, there's always the likelihood that something random—a freak injury, or a tweak to the player lineup—can change the course of the game in ways that nobody can anticipate. Also, given how player and coaching rosters vary from year to year, the teams taking the field can change radically between meetings." EA has correctly predicted eight of the last ten Super Bowl winners using the latest Madden game.
Of course not. This is just as stupid as asking if you could calculate somebody's phone number.
Try asking them that question at the start of the season and I'll be impressed if they get it right.
This is all information that most people deeply interested in the statistics of this match up know already. Wolfram Alpha doesn't really bring anything new to the table.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
It can calculate probabilities on the basis of collected data. However, it cannot predict the future. Based on article, it had a success rate of 80% (failure rate of 20%). However, a sample with 10 measurements hardly qualifies as big enough to determine if the estimation model is good enough to bet on it.
This is about as stupid as asking Bob, the trained seal, to throw a ball through a hoop with the team's logo on it. There's so many dumb random predictions out there that some of them are going to have very good records.
But the computer is actually going to be worse than a blind guess. Why are you analyzing all the games ever played by the Seahawks and Broncos? 10 years ago, not a single one of these players or coaches were on the team, making their results irrelevant.
There are hundreds of millions, nay billions, of dollars at stake every year gambling on the superbowl. Bookmakers in vegas spend literally millions of dollars computing the odds to a much deeper degree than this foolishness in the summary, and even they are not even close to 100% accurate.
If the bookmakers in Vegas can not guarantee their predictions, neither can Wolfram Alpha.
This is just as idiotic as the legions of sports 'journalists' who somehow believe that a game between two teams decades ago... with different players, different coaches, different gameplans, different weather, and DIFFERENT league rules has any bearing whatsoever on a game played today. Yet another heinous abuse of statistics by the mathematically illiterate.
And if you haven't read the article... this is not Wolfram's abuse of statistics... this is Nick Kolakowski. He even admits "Just remember that, as always, historical performance can be a pretty poor predictor of current results. Check out how well Wolfram Alpha predicted last year’s Super Bowl." Stop perpetuating mathematical ignorance.
You're forgetting the 1000's of people that bet on the game. Sure the fans care, but the people with money on the line REALLY care.
Developed by Stephen Wolfram
Wolfram alpha wasn't developed by Stephen Wolfram any more than Windows 95 was developed by Bill Gates. They key difference is that one of them has an enormous fortune while the other one has an enormous ego.
It looks to me like this is a Bayesian inference problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference). The question is this: What is the probability using the Madden game one can predict correctly the winner of the SuperBowl? The prior probability on the correct probabiity p is uniform,.i.e, it's just as likely to be 80% accurate as 11% as 55% etc. -- one can't tell without data. After 10 games we have 8 successes and 2 failures. This is a job for the Beta distribution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_distribution) The posterior probability on p is proportional to p^8(1-p)^2 which has maximum at p= 0.8 and variance 9*3/((9+3)^2(9+3+1) = 0.0144, and std = 0.12, assuming that 95% of the probability centered on p is within 2 std's of p = 0.8 then Pr(p >0.56) >= 0.95, so yeah, I would say it has some predictive ability.
It was written by Nerval's Lobster, a Slashdot reader.
Do you expend CPU time on video to watch television or movies? Do you employ computers whose resources might be better spent elsewhere to post on Slashdot? Do you play video games? If so, you could be putting your efforts and computers toward predicting terrorism, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or whatever using the relevant data sets. As a matter of fact, why are you even reading this comment? You've got work to do, the world needs saving, hop to it.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are merely human. We can fight hard, even heroically, to solve the world's problems. But we need downtime. Even God showed us it was okay to take the day off once in a while.
Good for you. You have different tastes than some other people. That makes you better.
But while Wolfram Alpha can crunch all the historical data it wants, and that data can suggest one team will likely triumph over another
I could've told you that without any data.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
but only 50% of the time. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This is one of the most important points here. Maybe the '78 Broncos beat the Seahawks, but that has absolutely no bearing on a game almost 4 decades later.
Yup, I'm a medieval reenactor this consumes 80% of my free time I do boring things like wear period accurate full plate (steel) and fight on a field with 20 - 50 other heavy's, with archers shooting at us (with rubber tipped arrows) oh and I can't forget about the siege weapons....
The super bowl is way better than the above..... I mean it has beer and chips and yelling at the TV coz the stupid ref isn't listening to your analysis of your fav teams performance, he should listen to you you painted yourself up in your teams colours and everything!
True, the casinos want equal betting on both sides. Therefore, the casinos analyze the odds of who will win only when they open the betting. GP is correct that those predictions are often quite wrong. Additionally, Vegas is full of other professionals who do make predictions of who will win, and most importantly, by how much they'll win. People into sports betting read the expert predictions all the time. These professionals have a pretty poor track record.
All of which means YOU are the ignorant fuck and worse than being ignorant you're a total dickhead.
Yeah, considering how I'd do it, I'd probably go with at most a 4 year examination - 40% for this year, 30-20-10 for the previous years. Short of building an actual game simulator like EA did, I'd probably look at median scoring, yards run/passed and such, then look at other team's averages, and whether other teams performed better/worse than their average, and by how much. For example, is team X better at blocking pass plays? Does team Y get most of it's yardage from passing, meaning it's at a disadvantage against X? Also, look at teams that both X & Y have played recently and weight those more.
For example, if it's found that teams playing X only average 84% of the yards they get normally, maybe we should estimate Y's yardage at 84% of it's average. Stuff like that.
I don't read AC A human right
Just in case anyone doesn't know, this is confirmation bias, and it's one of the inherent cognitive biases that pervades everyone's thinking. Remember, knowing is an undetermined fraction of the battle. Yay!
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
(1) Story about who will win the Super Bowl between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos
...Priceless
(2) 65 comments
(3) Zero mentions of "Seattle" or "Denver" in the comments.
I come here for the love
It's a game where one team of overpaid men (completely excluding woman go equal rights!) chase a small ball made of leather from one side of a patch of grass to the other.
Don't we have better things to do?
Truly bizarre to see such a comment on Slashdot. Figured most people here would be sports nuts.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Wishful thinking surely. Everyone I know despises ads and skips/blocks them whenever possible. I don't dispute that they have an affect when people do see them, but 'hooked' on them..?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
The first game of the season the Denver Broncos beat the Ravens in a rematch of the playoff matchup that eliminated the Broncos from the post-season last year. It was the kind of record-setting (7 TDs) moral victory that set the tone for the entire Broncos' season.
Random thing: The Superbowl Champs traditionally open the season at HOME. The only reason the Ravens were at Denver was a scheduling conflict with the Baltimore Orioles. The Ravens ended up missing the playoffs. If they had 1 more victory this season, they would have been in the playoffs.
No mention of the Superb Owl watching over all this?
This is nice and all ( a league that excludes men). But I still feel if the NWFA had a quarter back or kicker that would light up the NFL, they would hire her. I think you will find men are simply better at football then woman. More power more explosive, plus in American culture men are more exposed to football in their youth then girls. I recall a woman did go to the NFL trails to attempt to be a kicker a couple of years ago and her effort was very poor. I think she had a bad day, but no one would have hired on that performance.
No.
Nerval's Lobster is actually Nick Kolakowski, a content-writer who currently works for the Slashdot Business Intelligence / Slashdot Cloud / etc. sites. His title is 'senior editor' at slashdot; previous postings have been at various magazines.*
Check his user account. You will so zero (0) comments, and many (>1) story submissions.
Every single story submision Nerval's Lobster has made has been to a slash* story written by Nick Kolakowski.
In other words Nerval's Lobster is a cloak for a Dice-paid slashdot content filler, used in an effort to make submissions to the slashdot spinoff sites seem like they are coming from readers.
* From his bio: "Previously, he served as a staff editor at eWeek, where he specialized in writing about mobility and the cloud. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, Playboy, WebMD, Carrier Pigeon, The Evergreen Review, AutoWeek, and Trader Monthly. He is also the author of “How to Become an Intellectual” (Adams Media, 2012), a book of comedic nonfiction."
*shrug* Maybe Wolfram didn't code 100% of Alpha, but it exists because of his vision.
The downside of your hand-waving is that it distracts others away from his ideas and perspective, which is their loss.
So... here is 20 minutes of rather cool geeky viewing; it is well worth watching S.Wolfram walk through his ideas, and talk a bit about WolframAlpha as well:
http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_wolfram_computing_a_theory_of_everything.html
A seismograph?
Have gnu, will travel.
it's really about analyzing players not a team
that's why EA's simulator can predict well...it's based on probabilities of events based on statistics from individual players over their career. you can plug in any players into the roster and their system does the math
sure, a coach like Bill Walsh can make a system for a team that becomes so consistent that it *could* be analyzed over several years...but that level of consistency is very rare...the 49'ers west coast offense spanned two QB's, Montana and Young and multiple coaches
that's the rare exception
Thank you Dave Raggett
I'm writing this after the game. EA's Madden thought Denver was the winner. Wolfram Alpha thought a free account didn't have enough free CPU time to get the result. So in my experience, EA was wrong, and Wolfram was correct but not helpful.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The answer to the question is "No."
The Seahawks embarrassed the living daylights out of the Broncos.
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Well, that certainly changes things a bit.
Yeah, on the one hand, the story involves a complex AI inference engine. On the other, icky sports no nerd is interested in.
What's a good tie breaker? Hmmmm...what else might couch-potato nerds be interested in during the Superbowl?
I've got it! Pizza and Dorotos and pizza rolls!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Much easier just to go with the ape: http://espn.go.com/nfl/playoff...