Thursday, July 08, 2010

World Cup - the octopus

The octopus was correct in predicting that Spain would beat Germany in the Semi-Finals. REad this article.

Article by Lucky Tan.

My earlier prediction of a repeat of the 1974 Finals (i.e between Germany and Holland) failed to materialise. The octopus is smarter than me.
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am amazed by this octopus, Paul. Does it really have the power or simply pure luck?

July 08, 2010 9:10 AM
Anonymous said...

I heard of an analogy to explain this:

Put 200 people in a room. Ask all to flip a coin. Those with "heads" stay, the rest exit the room. By chance alone, you will have about 100 people left.

Repeat until you have one person left. And he is your "expert" coin flipper who got "heads" 6 times in a row.

If you repeat this with another 200 people, the result would be about the same.

July 08, 2010 5:32 PM
StFual said...

If you were to pick Germany every time in a knockout competition you would be right everytime until they got knocked out. If they played 10 rounds you would be right 9 times out of 10

I think the Octopus has an incentive (food,light,color - german owner ) to pick Germany and only ocasionally does not for random reasons. Since Germany wins most of the time he is right most of the time. He has only "picked " on two occasions and happenes to have been right. Its not a big run of success.

Its not a coin toss either.

July 08, 2010 8:22 PM

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