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Comment by powera | Hacker News Reader

This is a completely irrelevant achievement. Nobody can reasonably expect this to be repeatable, and if enough people make predictions somebody will get it right.

It's so blatantly irrelevant, I assume this company only cares about selling and not at all about their technology being able to do anything better than chance.

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It's a very easy claim to test though - just wait until next year's Derby and see if they can do it again.

It's also worth pointing out that they were challenged to make this pic by a reporter in advance of the Derby. They weren't just throwing out a random guess, they met the gauntlet that had been thrown down once already. This is a remarkable achievement in the face of skepticism.

If you read the CEO's statement in the original article, he wasn't claiming omniscience, but that horse-racing was certainly difficult to predict.

The better question is not, "will they hit the Preakness Superfecta?" but, how do UNU's picks do against the average guy at the track?

I'd bet they're pretty dang good.

See my above comment. Their picks are just a reflection of the odds set by the betting public. They got extremely lucky, since the Kentucky Derby almost never shakes out with the top 4 favorites finishing in order.

UNU has been making MANY impressive picks, and they do it in response to challenges from reporters, so there's proof.

NEWSWEEK challenged them to predict the Oscars and they outperformed over 90% of the experts, including 538.

Here is the NEWSWEEK article: http://www.newsweek.com/oscar-predictions-artificial-intelli...

Not strictly repeatable, but easily testable if they got lucky or not. There are thousands of horse races a year. Heck there are 2 more races left in the triple crown this year. It would be interesting to see if they could do the same for Preakness and Belmont. At some point they will either revert to the mean or show they have some serious predictive power in their methods.

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