

World Cup 2014 coding competition - lipsmack
http://engineering.footballradar.com/competitions/world-cup-2014.html

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lazyant
Just to recap:

    
    
      - guessing all the results doesn't guarantee you a win, but they decide the winner at their discretion.
      - you have to give them all the source code etc, under generous MIT licence.
      - they reserve the right to modify or withdraw the competition at any time.

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lipsmack
Hey lazyant, I'm one of the engineers at Football Radar.

Thanks for the comment - we're happy to listen to community feedback,
especially if it looks like we're doing something dubious - and I promise,
we're not trying to!

I'll try to address your concerns:

* Maybe we could have explained it better, but the competition is about writing the best predictive model, not correctly guessing the results of the tournament. Football results are not deterministic - the best anyone can do is write a thorough probabilistic model that is correct more often than not. We can only judge this competition based on the source code, because the methodology is more important than the outcome.

* We have modified our terms to try and address some of your other points. We ask for submissions to be under the MIT licence so that we can promote the winning entry and share some of the best ideas with the community. We're not interested in using solutions in our own products.

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joosters
Suggestion: grab the betting odds from Betfair and use those to derive the
percentage chances. You'll be piggybacking off of the work done by people and
companies who do this for a living and are good at what they do!

Alternatively, if you think that you can do better, then there's no need to
enter the competition, as your insights would make you more money through
gambling :)

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patrickk
Talking of Betfair and percentages, this may be of interest:

[http://www.gambletron2000.com/about](http://www.gambletron2000.com/about)

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yskchu
So they're asking for the best algorithm (and the source implementation also)
to guess football and other results, which is worth millions, and all you get
in return is a crummy laptop? Not much incentive to participate

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willis77
* The algorithms must be MIT Open Sourced, so you are also welcome to take the results and make millions with them

* There is no guarantee the algorithms will beat the betting line, so saying they are worth millions is not generally true

* If the authors of such an algorithm find that they are more accurate than the bookies, they can always keep it to themselves and make millions

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blue11
The contest is for the best predictive model for ... an undefined objective
function! Unless I missed it, I didn't see a formula of how the models will be
scored. For example, you can have an objective function where predicting the
winner gives you a lot more points than predicting which team will not make it
out of the group stage. Or you can have one where all the different stages are
equally important.

Depending on the scoring method, it might be advantageous to generate
solutions that are not mathematically correct, that is, solutions where each
row sums to 1, but the columns don't sum to 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, and 1,
respectively.

You really need to define what the objective function is here.

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corry
Any soccer/football fans will tell you that it's a tough sport to predict for
a variety of reasons: low scoring games, lots of potential for human error in
officiating, high levels of competence of even weak teams, team dynamic vs
individual skill, etc.

I'd guess that it's one of the harder sports to build a prediction model for.
Good luck!

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wslh
Yes, this is something every soccer fan knows. Also, the world cup is every 4
years and it's difficult, if not impossible, to predict how a renewed team
will work. You can make a cluster of few teams that will win in 99% of the
cases but not optimize much more from that.

If someone wants to know why it's so difficult, look at how a single player
can change the whole game:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY40__rBvSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY40__rBvSk)

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mistermumble
In the case of the "hand of god" goal, it is not just the player, but the
(unseeing) referee that allowed that goal.

A complete predictive model would not only have data about players, coaches,
weather conditions, etc but also referees.

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wslh
The point is: you can't predict such outliers. Maradona passed 6 players
before the goal.

