CNN - April 7, 2009
Once 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's what happened this year at the NCAA men's 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. "This year, it was sort of revenge of the humans, in a way," he said. It's 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. For more>>>