Wisdom of the Crowd

[3iff]

Wisdom of the crowd

Basically, an idea that the combined views of a wide group of people are better than individuals. Review it on the internet for more information.

In order to test this, and provide a small diversion for forum members, here is a small quiz that will require participants to estimate or guess at answers to questions. It uses the same system as the Honesty Quiz in that NO RESEARCH is allowed and would in fact defeat the whole idea. You are allowed to do calculations if you wish but no looking up formulae or data. Use only the knowledge in your head.

Scoring. Your score for each question will be your percentage accuracy on the actual answer. High scores are best. So, if the answer was 100 and you guessed 80 (or 120) then your score would be 80 (you're 20% lower or higher than the true answer). Best score for the 10 questions is 1000, worst score is 0. Guesses more than double the true answer will be scored as zero points.

The Crowd will take scores according to the average answer from all players for all questions, so if 4 players gave answers to that question of 80,90,95,120 then the Crowd would have an answer of 96.25 for a score of 3.75

The question is...can anyone be smarter than the crowd?

Answers can be given in imperial (feet, miles, pounds) or Metric (cm, km, kg). I will convert to imperial for the purposes of calculating scores.

10 questions follow. PLEASE answer every question. Guesses and estimations will probably be required for many of the questions. The quiz will be up for a couple of weeks. PM your answers to me...DO NOT post any question related information or queries here until the quiz is over.

Thankyou

Questions are spoilered here...



1. In 2003, Mars and Earth were at their closest for many years. What was the distance?

2. What is the length of the Canada - US international land border?

3. What was the population of Tokyo as taken/estimated on 1st April 2010?

4. How many people died when the Titanic sank?

5. How old (in years) was Elvis Presley when he died?

6. What is the current world record for the Mens Javelin throw?

7. What was the budget (in US dollars) for the original Star Wars film made in 1977?

8. In which year was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart born?

9. What is the current length of the Suez canal?

10. How many F1 races did Ayrton Senna win?

[Suspence]

Great concept, I loved the book on this subject by James Surowiecki. Also, great questions because I have almost no idea on any of them. I'm definitely betting on the crowd.

PM sent.
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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature.

[jesternl]

/ in, PM sent

[JDTAY]

Sent. I might have to be discounted from the averages though, most of my answers are probably outliers.
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Prohibit nothing. Disclose everything.

[Chuck]

I somehow managed to come up with a response.

[MatthewV]

I'm betting on Scurra.

[carrier_of_the_arch]

Answers sent. Am expecting a lot of my answers to be waaaay off

[wordcross]

+1
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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

[MNOWAX]

/in and submitted.
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The Man The Myth The Legend
MNOWAX

[3iff]

Well, 12 entries so far, even after the necessity of changing one of the questions.

Some interesting results and some utterly bizarre answers.

Game will remain open until the end of next week at least.

[Trojan Horse]

sent

Now preparing for my extreme embarrassment...

[Zag]

As long as MNO is playing, I virtually guarantee I'll do better than the average.

[MNOWAX]

HA! Zag and his infinite wisdom knowing I will throw off the curve...

No one ever said i should be on Jeopardy.... but lets just say i was sure of one.
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The Man The Myth The Legend
MNOWAX

[itisally]

I in-ed this one!
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I could agree with you, but then we would both be wrong.

[Courk]

/sent

[milkshake]

I demand results!

[3iff]

I was going to do them this morning but have a query on an answer provided by a player...so I'm giving them a chance to clarify things...

Results should appear by late today or tomorrow morning...

[milkshake]

Great. I mentioned this in PM but I thought this was fun and I'd love to see another sometime. Cheers!

[3iff]

Still waiting for the clarification so it'll be Tuesday morning before the results appear.

I intend to do 2 more of these, one similar to the first and a third with just years/dates. Both should be better than the first one (which seems to have been fun for the participants - and gave me some laughs).

[3iff]

Final answers are in...results published here soon...that is later today.

While I intended to run 2 more of these, they will not be done straight away as I have a new idea for a mini-quiz. Details on that later.

[3iff]

The questions were set such that most of them required a guess, hence the wide range of answers. Players could always score well on Q5 (an age) and Q8 (a year of birth). Q6 (throwing distance) and Q10 (race wins) were generally high scoring too.

Answers came in various formats, usually miles, kilometres, feet, yards and metres, even one appearance of light-minutes. All answers were converted to miles for all questions except for Q6 which was calculated in metres. For those that don't know, typing "34 yards in metres" into a google search box will provide an instant conversion value.


1. In 2003, Mars and Earth were at their closest for many years. What was the distance?
34.6 million miles/55.76 million km
Lots of incorrect guesses. One person thought Mars came close enough to be just 4 times further away than the moon. One player thought the closest approach was just 12,000km (the moon is 380,000km away). Also guesses of 1, 2 and 13 billion (where Pluto is 3.6 billion miles away from the sun). I liked the answers of 2 light minutes (22.3m miles) and .42AU (39m miles). The most spectacular guess was 56.3 billion miles which is about 15 times further away from the sun than the orbit of Pluto. The best question for spectacularly wild answers.

2. What is the length of the Canada - US international land border?
5,522 miles. I suspect that includes the Alaskan border...and why not.
Just 2 wild guesses, 12,000 miles and 5km (9 miles)

3. What was the population of Tokyo as taken/estimated on 1st April 2010?
13,010,279
I suspect some players were guessing at the population of Japan, not Tokyo. Some said 50m, one guessed 111m, one 200m (their typo, intended to say 20m), one said 450m and one said 10,000. Possibly some confusion about whether they should include the metropolitan area of Tokyo...

4. How many people died when the Titanic sank?
1,517
Guesses ranged from 100 to 2,346.

5. How old (in years) was Elvis Presley when he died?
42
A couple of perfect guesses, other guesses were mainly between 40 and 50 with most around 45-50. One player thought 57.

6. What is the current world record for the Mens Javelin throw?
98.48 metres
Many guesses were around 100m, a couple in the 65-75m and a few in the 140m+ range. One player suggested 229m (250 yards) while another said 500m (which would be impressive). One player thought 1 kilometre (1093 yards).

7. What was the budget (in US dollars) for the original Star Wars film made in 1977?
$11 million
A question that caught a lot of players out, with current film budgets of $200m being considered budget films. 34 years of inflation also take their toll. £30,000 was the lowest guess with a few guesses of £30m.

8. In which year was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart born?
1756
Even a guess 350 years out would score 80 points so this was a high scoring question. 1402 was the earliest, 1936 was the latest but everyone scored well here.

9. What is the current length of the Suez canal?
120.11 miles/193.3 km
I think only a handful of players scored serious points here. Guesses ranged from 1 mile to 5000 miles. I wouldn't have known the answer either.

10. How many F1 races did Ayrton Senna win?
41
Some players said "Who?" or "What's F1?" (probably Americans!). Answers ranged from 0 to 63 but almost everyone scored here too. It appears that F1 racing is virtually unknown in the USA.


Scores: With notable achievements if applicable.
(display messes up, can't work out how to space it well)

681.9 Scurra (6 scores of 90+)
654.6 MatthewV (9 of 10 questions score points, 3 * 90+)
637.8 Jesternl (every question scored points, 3 * 90+)
617.4 Zag (9 of 10 questions score points)
571.7 Chuck (every question scored points)
566.1 L'lanmal (9 of 10 questions score points)
523.8 Sablliminal
516.6 JDTAY (3 scores of 90+)
495.0 Milkshake (every question scored points)
487.4 itisally
485.0 CROWD <<<
473.0 Suspence
430.6 Tojan Horse (3 scores of 90+, including 1 perfect score)
418.9 Lexprod
413.8 Courk
410.5 jesus_saves
386.4 MNOWAX (3 scores of 90+, including 1 perfect score)
362.6 Wordcross (6 questions scored less than 5 points each)
337.9 Duke Gnome
287.2 bgg1996 (every question scored points, but three of these scored less than 2 points each)
265.5 Carrier_o_t_a (5 questions scored less than 0.4 points each)

So once again, Scurra triumphs at one of my quizzes. MatthewV won his bet...(post 6 in the thread)...but only just.

Congratulations to all those who beat the Crowd.

The Crowd. Answers are an average of all the answers given by the players.

Q1. 3,653m miles to Mars (over 10,000% out)
Q2. 4,316 miles of US-Canada border
Q3. 54.5 million people in Tokyo (300% out)
Q4. 952 deaths from Titanic
Q5. 47 Elvis age
Q6. 183m javelin throw
Q7. $9.8m Star Wars budget
Q8. 1,757 Year of Mozart birth
Q9. 484 miles of Suez canal (300% out)
Q10. 21.7 wins for Senna

Perfect score for Mozart, good scores for Elvis age, Star Wars budget and US-Canada budget, fair for Titanic deaths and Senna wins. Zeros for Mars/Earth distance, Tokyo population and Suez canal. The Crowd failed to do well because so many players vastly overestimated many of the answers.

Points were awarded depending on the percentage accuracy of guesses, a perfect answer gave 100 points with a one point drop for every 1% inaccuracy. That meant that underguessing was still likely to score something while guessing at over double the true answer got nothing. So Q5 (age) and Q8 (year) had limited bounds of answers and always scored high.

Q1 had a large number of extremely high guesses and caused zero point scores. Q9 (Suez canal) was probably the most interesting as almost everyone severely overestimated its length and scored nothing. Both of these questions caused major problems for most players.

There may well be another one of these in the near future, and tips (for those who didn't do so well) would be...think about your answers and aim to underestimate rather than overestimate.

Hope you enjoyed this. Many players seemed to do so.

[MatthewV]

So Scurra, would you have seen this without me messaging you???

I suck at trivia. But apparently I am good with approximate guesses. If you have an spreadsheet of the answers, I could format it for you. Email it to me at pseudonym125[at]yahoo [period] com

[3iff]

[MatthewV]

Sure, I'll clean it up a bit.

[Zag]

It was a very interesting game for strategy. I came to the conclusion that for questions where you are pretty sure you are close, you should shade your guess a little higher. For questions where you have no clue, you should lower your guess a bit.

Thanks, 3iff, for running it.

Darn you Scurra, for once again dominating a trivial game.

[itisally]

Not sure how I feel about being right there with the crowd.

It was fun to do, I think I could come up with a better plan now that I have a feel for it.
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I could agree with you, but then we would both be wrong.

[Suspence]

Thanks for running this. I would love to see more iterations of this game.

Might be nice to do a game with 10 similar questions, like "what year did it happen", where the guesses could be measured on absolute error, rather than percentage.
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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature.

[Scurra]

[MatthewV]

mmm data!

[jesternl]

nice one, thanks 3iff!

[carrier_of_the_arch]

Thanks for running that 3iff! I got a few laughs from the results too. And what can I say I suck at trivia

[3iff]

MatthewV:

Thanks for your efforts...perhaps I should reorganise the data so it looks like that next time.

Suspence:

My intentions exactly. I have a "year based" quiz lined up. Still pondering a scoring method but it should be easier to calculate.

Glad players enjoyed the diversion...

[bgg1996]

Oh no! I'm terrible at year-based questions.
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The one member below 18

[3iff]