Okay, so I stumbled upon this thing called “Paolini Andreescu Prediction” and I was like, “What the heck is that?” I’m always up for trying new prediction methods, especially if they involve some number crunching. Turns out, it’s a way to predict results in certain types of competitions, I think mainly sports,but you know I just wanted to test that.
Getting Started
First, I had to, you know, actually understand what I was doing. I did a little digging, and basically, it’s all about using past results to figure out future ones. Seems simple enough, right? There’s some math involved, but nothing too crazy, as far as I could tell, at least at first. It is based on calculating some scores.
The Deep Dive
So, I grabbed some data. I decided to use some old football scores, just because that’s what I had readily available. Then I set up a messy spreadsheet. I’m not gonna lie, it looked like a bomb went off in Excel. Columns everywhere, numbers flying around, my dog gave me a weird look.
I started plugging in the formulas, which, I’ll admit, I had to look up a couple of times. I’m pretty sure I messed up the order of operations at least once. Order is key!
- Input past results.
- Calculate initial scores using some sort of averaging thing.
- Update scores based on new results (this is where the magic happens).
- Repeat for each result.
- Generate predictions.
- Feel Smart.
The moment of truth
After all that data entry and formula fiddling, I finally had some predictions. Were they any good? Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? I compared my predictions to the actual results. Some were surprisingly close! Others… not so much. Let’s just say I won’t be quitting my day job to become a professional gambler anytime soon.
The Aftermath
So, what did I learn? That prediction is hard! It’s messy, even when it’s kinda simple, and you can’t expect to get it right all the time. Even when you’re using what is supposed to be a powerful tool, you will get it wrong sometimes. Paolini Andreescu, at least in my little experiment, was okay. Not perfect, but not totally useless either. It’s definitely something I’d like to play around with more. Maybe try different data sets, tweak the formulas, see if I can improve the accuracy. Or maybe I’ll just stick to watching the games and yelling at the TV like a normal person.
All in all a funny afternoon and that is all that matters.
