
A.I. wins the Superfecta at the Kentucky Derby, turns $20 bet into $11k - hbrid
http://unu.ai/unu-superfecta-11k/
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pboutros
When 'artificial intelligence' is the same thing as 'crowdsourcing and
averaging'...

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKNVwXU2rrI](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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd))

~~~
Cortexia
Traditional "Wisdom of crowds" are polls that take averages, which end up
being fairly impressive. Swarms are real-time dynamics systems that converge
on local maxima. It takes a little thinking to appreciate the difference, but
it's profound. Swarms blow away traditional methods because they foster a
real-time emergent intelligence, while polls just take a snap shot of group
opinion. They're very different.

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LargeWu
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.

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.

~~~
divebomb
Well, keep in mind they ran the predictions twice, once two weeks before the
race, and then again after the lineup was determined in the middle of the
week, switching one horse. I don't know what the odds were at that time.

And, if anyone else has a winning Superfecta ticket, I haven't seen it. So,
it's not like this was some easy pick.

~~~
LargeWu
They re-ran their analysis after post positions came out, but they didn't
really have a big impact this year, since none of the top contenders had
particularly unfavorable gates.

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powera
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.

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.

~~~
onion2k
It's a very easy claim to test though - just wait until next year's Derby and
see if they can do it again.

~~~
divebomb
It's also worth pointing out that they were challenged to make this pic by a
reporter in advance of the Derby. They weren't just throwing out a random
guess, they met the gauntlet that had been thrown down once already. This is a
remarkable achievement in the face of skepticism.

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.

~~~
LargeWu
See my above comment. Their picks are just a reflection of the odds set by the
betting public. They got extremely lucky, since the Kentucky Derby almost
never shakes out with the top 4 favorites finishing in order.

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daveguy
The derby has 20 horses in the competition. Winning the superfecta requires
picking the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th places in correct order.

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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Ah but as linkbait for a SaaS company? Priceless :-) As I recall there have
been other efforts at this, generally using professional handicappers, and
while crowds can silence otherwise compelling outliers they are certainly not
infallible. I was reading where someone did something similar to the NCAA
bracket, taking a source of many thousand user supplied brackets and trying to
normalize them to a "golden" bracket, it was wrong in a couple of major ways.

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carapace
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.)

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joshagogo
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.

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dragontamer
This isn't an AI. UNU.ai looks like a discussion platform or wisdom-of-the-
crowds thing.

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quux
Is this really an AI? Or is it just harnessing the wisdom of the crowd?

