Posted on 05/10/2016 4:21:33 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Picking one horse to win a race is hard enough, but four horses and their exact placements in the grand Kentucky Derby? It's practically impossible.
But that's exactly what just happened thanks to a crowdsourced intelligence called Swarm Intelligence. The bet is called the superfecta, and there's a 1 in 540 chance of winning it — bettors have to pick out the horses that'll place first, second, third and fourth in the Derby.
TechRepublic reporter Hope Reese challenged Unanimous A.I., a company that creates Swarm artificial intelligence technologies that allow groups to combine their thoughts and feelings in real-time to "answer questions, make decisions, or just have fun," to pick out winners. Unanimous' Swarm Intelligence is called UNU and it has correctly predicted winners for the Super Bowl, Oscars, NCAA and more in the past.
(Excerpt) Read more at mashable.com ...
Surely the group has done a swarm thing on the November election.
It may have been 1 in 540 this year but the odds depend on the number of starters.
Well, duh... The top 4 horses finished in the order of their odds. ie: the crowd at Churchill picked them too..
So did I.
Let’s see them do it in the Preakness and Belmont. Then I’ll be impressed.
Last year’s superfecta paid only $63.41 - less than the trifecta ($202). There were fewer bets laid on the superfecta than the trifecta, and the bets that were laid were not randomly distributed.
http://helloracefans.com/pdfs/charts/2015-Kentucky-Derby.pdf
This year’s superfecta paid $542.10
http://helloracefans.com/pdfs/charts/2016-Kentucky-Derby.pdf
The 2014 Derby Superfecta paid over $15K.
A longshot finishing 2nd really drove up the odds.
How many different combinations did they enter to achieve that one win?
Well among 20 horses there are 116,280 combinations.
It would be foolish to play all 116,280 combinations.
I think the better question is, “How often does the favorite win AND the 2nd favorite finish 2nd AND the 3rd favorite finish 3rd and the 4th favorite finish 4th?”
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