talkmagic.co.uk

So we all agree that the Derren Brown 'explanation' as to how he predicted the lottery was cack (at best), but the 'wisdom of crowds' theory interested me as I'd never heard of it before.

I came into the office on Monday and sent a picture of some Smarties to about 15 people in my office that I'd acquired from Google.

I asked for calculated guesses - no counting allowed - as to the number of Smarties in the pic. I counted them - 155.

I got 15 answers - some waaaay too low, some waaaay too high and some around the actual figure. When I averaged all the guesses out the result was 153.9! Only 1.1 of a Smartie out! Pretty cool and it showed my colleagues were fairly intuitive beasts!

So, and don't shout at me here, I had them peruse the last 100 Lotto results (acquired from the official website). We then all predicted 6 numbers and I worked out the average for each of the six.

Amazingly enough we got 4 numbers in last night's draw! I know this is PURE coincidence but half the people in here really believe it all.

I've now added last night's numbers to the other 100 and we've predicted 6 more numbers for this Saturday - will be interesting to see what happens nonetheless!

Anyone else got the Lotto bug with all this recent publicity?

That's pretty cool

Sounds like hard work hehe. But you could be onto something! Although averages, rules of law, probability for me is a void.....

I remember at school i flipped a coin 10 times and each times tails.

even if theres a 50/50 chance of it being either.......its still pure luck i believe.

But good luck!!!

Well the wisdom of crowds theory is fairly solid. There are limits to it, I think, but it depends on the question you're asking. The one I can't get my head around is trying to apply it to "where is the best place to stand on a tube platform?" which is confounded not just by people's different value systems, but by impacting on the question itself.

The wisdom of crowds can be applied to things like estimates, but as soon as pure chance comes into play, it ceases to be an estimate and winds up being a guess, just on a larger scale.