{"57518":{"#nid":"57518","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Humans trump computers in NCAA hoops picks","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\n\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cem\u003ECNN \u003C\/em\u003E- April 7, 2009\u003Cbr \/\u003EOnce in a while, a gut feeling and some human instinct can out-think a computer.  A professor says people, not computers, were most successful at predicting the NCAA basketball tournament.  That\u0027s what happened this year at the NCAA men\u0027s basketball tournament, as computer models trying to predict the outcome of March Madness generally fared worse than their human counterparts, said Joel Sokol, a professor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.  \u0022This year, it was sort of revenge of the humans, in a way,\u0022 he said.  It\u0027s a trend for computer scientists like Sokol and statistics junkies to use online data to try to pick the winners of the notoriously random tournament. About 40 people and groups use Internet statistics -- like team records and point margins, for example -- to publish such reports on college basketball, said Kenneth Massey, whose Web site, masseyratings.com, lets users compare the analyses.  \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2009\/TECH\/04\/07\/ncaa.computer.bracket\/\u0022\u003EFor more\u0026gt;\u0026gt;\u0026gt;\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":"","field_summary_sentence":"","uid":"27279","created_gmt":"2009-04-07 00:00:00","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:06:25","author":"Barbara Christopher","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2009-04-07T00:00:00-04:00","iso_date":"2009-04-07T00:00:00-04:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"57458","name":"ISyE External News"}],"categories":[{"id":"145","name":"Engineering"},{"id":"135","name":"Research"}],"keywords":[],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cstrong\u003EBarbara Christopher\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003EIndustrial and Systems Engineering\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.gatech.edu\/contact\/index.html?id=bt3\u0022\u003EContact Barbara Christopher\u003C\/a\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E404.385.3102\u003C\/strong\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["bchristopher@isye.gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}