How our Prediction Engine works…and can you improve it?
Now that we are finally in beta and are inviting people into check out our site and make suggestions for improvement we are starting to share what’s happening ‘behind the scenes’ in an effort to improve our ‘Prediction Engine’.
So below is a snapshot from our guide which explains how it works. What can we do to improve the Prediction Engine? To sign up for an invitation go right here. Post your suggestions folks…
- First things first….What is it?
- Predictions & Forecasts
- Browsing & Finding Predictions
- Creating your own prediction
- Forecasting a prediction
- The Nostradamical Prediction Engine
- Confirming and settling predictions
- Vision, Potential and Influence
- Categories & Tagging
- Lists, Lists…Prediction lists
First things first….What is it?
Nostradamical is…
- A social web application based around the collective prediction of future
events. It is based on the concept that ‘many heads are better than
one’ (also known as collective intelligence, collective reasoning, group
wisdom, etc) - A platform for social networking, allowing people to come together through
shared interests and opinions - A source of predictive information on future events across various categories
from sporting events, to celebrity gossip, to world affairs. - An application that will eventually integrate with your favourite web
applications such as Facebook, My Space, and Bebo, allowing for example, members
to show their ‘current predictions’ on other sites
Essentially Nostradamical is a fun approach to a serious topic: The ability
of ‘the crowd’ to predict events with better overall success than
‘the individual’.
Oh, and one other thing…we are new, growing and constantly trying to improve
our product so we really value your feedback and opinions on how we can improve!
Predictions & Forecasts
Nostradamical is based around the prediction of future world events. Once signed up for your
free account you can create a new prediction, for example, “China will win
more than 10 gold medals in the Olympics”.
Once your prediction is published and live to the world, other members can create
forecasts against it. A forecast of greater than 50% means that
the prediction is likely, and a forecast of less than 50% means it is
unlikely (in their opinion).
The Nostradamical Prediction Engine takes into account various factors to produce
a ‘group probability’ which represents the prediction’s current likelihood. Like
share prices, the group probability moves and up down as time passes based on
members’ latest predictions.
The ‘current group probability’ of a prediction is calculated from
all the individual predications members have made. The more individual forecasts
made against a prediction, the more reliable the prediction becomes (in theory).
So, essentially one prediction can have many individual forecasts against it
influencing the overall likelihood. This is called ‘the group probability’.
Browsing & Finding Predictions
You can search for a specific prediction from the top search box on each page or
browse predictions in a number of different ways. You can for example browse for
‘entertainment’ related predictions, or predictions that are ‘most likely’ based on their
number of predictions and current group probability.
Creating your own prediction
Once logged in to Nostradamical you can create a new prediction from the top menu.
As the prediction ‘owner’ you can give it an initial starting ‘likelihood’ (probability).
Any prediction ending within a 3 month horizon can be created. We have purposefully
restricted this as waiting to see if the world will end in the year 2199 for
example, might be quite boring.
An prediction must also have a confirmed outcome that can be verified as true of
false. For example, predicting the next presidential election candidate would
have a clear result, but predicting that July will be rainy is difficult to
confirm with a simple ‘true’ or ‘false’ result.
Lastly, you can add a picture to your prediction, making it more appealing to visitors. Pictures show up in prediction listings.
Forecasting a prediction
From the prediction’s main page any member make a forecast for its likelhood using the prediction slider. Your input is added to the prediction and the
Nostradamical Prediction Engine calculates the new ‘group probability’.
You can revise your forecast for a prediction at any time but your
old forecast is automatically superseded by your new one. The closer to an
prediction’s ‘end time’ you make a prediction, the less you are
rewarded if successful. So if you want to win the big points, make predictions
early on and stick to them!
The Nostradamical Prediction Engine
The Nostradamical Prediction Engine takes into account several factors when
trying to calculate the group probability of a predictions. We are still fine tuning
these as we want to get the best model available. If you have suggestions for
improvement please send us some feedback.
The influencing factors are:
- The number of existing predictions. The more predictions that exist already,
the less ‘power’ your individual prediction has to influence the
group probability. - The time left before the prediction ends. To stop member’s making wild
predictions minutes before an prediction closes a prediction’s ‘power’
reduces as the prediction draws to a close. - The member’s status. A member who was been successful in the past
has more power to influence the group probability than a member who has just
started with no proven track record.
Confirming and settling predictions
When the prediction reaches its end date, the prediction owner will be notified that
they need to confirm the final outcome of their prediction to update all the members
that made predictions against it.
Members that forecast correctly are rewarded with ‘vision’ and move
up in status, becoming increasingly ‘nostradamical’. A ‘correct’
prediction could mean that you forecasted the prediction as ‘correctly true’
(>=50%) or ‘correctly false’ (<50%).
Importantly, if the group was correct overall in their prediction each member
is rewarded with a group bonus, even if their individual prediction was wrong.
Power to the people!
Vision, Potential and Influence
Each prediction you make gains you ‘potential’. This is like a
bet and states the amount of ‘vision’ you will gain if your prediction
turns out to be correct. Factors that influence the potential from a prediction are:
- How far into the future the prediction ends. The further ahead you make a prediction,
the more potential you gain. So make a last minute forecast against an prediction
won’t gain you much vision. - Your confidence in your prediction. Simply put, a confident positive prediction
say for90% or confident negative prediction for 10% gets you more ‘Potential’
than sitting on the fence around the 50% mark. So, make a confident prediction
and stick to it. - The number of existing predictions. If you are one of the first to make
a forecast you stand to gain more ‘Vision’ than if there are already many
forecasts against an prediction. The idea here is to stop members ‘following
the crowd’ with their opinion of an prediction. So again, get in early to
get the big points!
The prediction owner can forecast the likelihood of their own prediction but they do not
gain any extra ‘Vision’ if the prediction is later correct. This
is to stop people creating their own (potentially silly) predictions and gaining
from them directly (e.g. I predict I will wake up tomorrow)!
The more ‘nostradamical’ a user becomes, the more power they have
to influence the ‘current probability’ of a prediction,
based on their previous success rates.
Conversely, ‘Newbies’ or members with low status do not carry much
‘weight’ with their individual predictions until they achieve more
success.
Members with high status rise to the top of the ‘Nostradamical Pyramid’,
achieving recognition for their sharp skills, judgement and luck. The Pyramid
contains seven levels of status from ‘Newbie’ all the way up to
‘Oracle’. Take a look at The Pyramid here.
Categories & Tagging
Every prediction is classified into a category (e.g. Entertainment, Sport, Finance,
Current Affairs, etc) and can be tagged with keywords
The most popular predictions (based on number of predictions and views) are ranked
in each category, making it easy for you to find predictions on your favourite topics.
Members’ own successes are tracked by category, ensuring a successful
member in the Finance category for example, doesn’t have the same influence
over the Sport category
Lists, Lists…Prediction lists
Even if you have not created any predictions yourself you can group others together into
common themes or topics by using Prediction Lists. A Prediction List groups
individual predictions together on one page at one address. For example, “Brad’s
Oscar Predictions” could be my list that contains individual predictions from
other members, ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Movie’, etc. Give
it a try!
We’re open for Private Beta testing…sign up!
After several long months of hard work, bug fixing and reworking various aspects of the application, Nostradamical.com is now in Private Beta launch. We are looking for opinionated individuals to sign up, give it a try and give us some feedback. Want to sign up? Just to straight to the homepage and sign up for your Private Beta Application.
What’s it all about? The sell…
- Publish your predictions to the world in just a few minutes (like a blog). We’ll instantly publish your prediction to your favourite search engines.
- Get the inside track on what people are predicting - from sporting events to political battles, to celebrity gossip and rumours.
- Use collective intelligence to predict future world events
- Share opinions, meet like minded people
- The Nostradamical Prediction Engine carefully promotes successful group predictions
- Rise through 7 levels of status and gain fame as an oracle of the future. Promote your blog or website
Giving us feedback:
We are looking for feedback on the following items:
- General look, feel and usability
- The prediction engine - does it make sense? How can we improve it? What factors didn’t we consider in making a fair & effective prediction market?
- Sociability - how can we make the application more fun and sociable?
- Integration - how can we make this more integrated with your favourite web apps? This one shouldn’t be too hard, as we have not integrated with any apps yet. We want to get the core prediction engine working well before we start branching out.
Interested? So are we. Sign up here!
Building a sociable prediction market at Nostradamical
Crowdsourcing…eh?
Hi folks, this is the first post of the Nostradamical.com blog. What is Nostradamical.com? It is a project I have been developing for the last year or so that was inspired primarily by James Surowiecki’s seminal book, ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’. The book suggests that often, and under the right conditions, crowds can make overall better decisions that individuals. Known sometimes as ‘collective intelligence’, ‘crowdsourcing’, or ‘collaborative filtering’, the concept is sweeping the Web 2.0 world by storm with other great sites like Delicious and Threadless taking the lead.
The book got me thinking, if crowds can make better decisions that individuals could large crowds of people work together to predict the outcome of future events with better overall success than individuals? This is how Nostradamical.com was born.
So, what is a ‘prediction market’?
The site is technically what is known as a ‘prediction market’. Members make a prediction and invite others to ‘hedge a bet’ on the future outcome, given what they know and believe. If the prediction later turns out to be true participants gain from it in terms of some sort of (non financial) return. In the case of Nostradamical the return is increased ‘Vision’ measured in ‘Future Minutes’ (influenced I have to say by the fairly average Nicholas Cage film, ‘Next’).
Great, what’s in it for me?
So what is the benefit of all this for the members of the site? Why would someone take time to participant in a group prediction? Indeed this is the ‘flaw’ in the system that author Jeff Howe points out in his book, ‘Crowdsourcing’. Well the benefit in this case is that Nostradamical is a ‘microblog’ that allows people to publish their opinions to friends, peers and the world wide Blogosphere, in a fast and easy way. So the benefit is recognition. Users can sign up, create a prediction and in minutes publish it to blog search engines like Technorati.com, that tracks 120 million blogs worldwide. Without having your own blog you can publish your opinions and get heard by the masses. 120 million bloggers are doing it already and they can’t be wrong, can they?
The site has many social aspects to it, including Facebook-style ‘friends & associates’, Google maps integration for geo-mapping of worldwide predictions, and eventual integration with Facebook, Bebo and other social networking applications. The site is not a ‘destination’, it is an application that does one thing well and is designed to integrate with your existing and favourite apps. Nostradamical is a sociable take on a prediction market.
From then until now…
The project has been running for the past year and has taken quite some time to develop, with many aspects having gone through rework several times. Several burning questions have taken time to fine tune and are still under ‘iteration’. For example, how do you make group predictions appealing to others? How do you reward participation? How do you stop last minute speculating? How do you stop ‘group think’ where users just follow the crowd? How do you reward for success and penalise for failure? Do you reward the group for success even if individuals fail in their predictions? What kind of time horizon do you limit predictions to in order to make them more appealing? All good questions…now answers…(for the moment).
Technology
The application has been developed in the excellent and versatile Ruby on Rails platform, thanks to the feedback and help of many thousands of Ruby on Rails community members. Ruby on Rails is the future.
Oh, and who is Nostradamus?
Glad you asked. Nostradamus was of course the infamous seer that lived in the 14th century and prophecised about future events even into the 20th century. More info at Wikipedia and at the entire site dedicated to him, http://www.nostradamus.org/.
Want to get involved? We love feedback.
The site is now in final alpha testing and the private beta is due for launch next month. If you want to sign up now ahead of the official beta launch by all means click here – your opinions and feedback are all really appreciated! Note there may be a wait of a few weeks if you sign up now. Watch this space!
