Hi, fellow INDUCTIVE e-mail list people (and apologies for any cross-posting).
To the very best of my knowledge, the world's longest-running probabilistic competition is 15 years old and now in its 16th year, going back to Round 3 of the 1995 Australian Football League (AFL) season. The competition resumes in a few hours from now (slight update due to delay in posting: started a few hours ago, with one game now having been played), but it is a small matter if you happen to miss the first game or the first few games. After all, the season has 22 x 8 + 9 = 176 + 9 = 185 games, and the scoring system of 1 + log2(p) means that a score of 0 in the first game or so is not a particularly bad thing. The Australian Football League (AFL) footy season starts on Thu 25/March/2010, and with it so does Monash University's (now 15y.o.) probabilistic footy-tipping (or football prediction) competition. This competition is free for all to enter, and/but entrants not only choose a team, they must also choose a probability that a team that will win. (If entrants don't put in their tips [i.e., their predictions] before the start of a game, this defaults to a 50%-50% tip of 0.5 and a score of 1 + log2(0.5) = 1 + (-1) = 0.) Scoring is logarithmic, and (in the long run) this rewards those who are best at choosing probabilities. With information as the negative logarithm of a probability, this can also be said to be (as far as we know) the world's longest-running compression-based competition. Further info' on joining (which is free and open to all), the (logarithmic) scoring system, the history of the competition (which goes back 15 years to 1995), media coverage, etc. is available via links from www.csse.monash.edu.au/~footy . For even further information (such as the uniqueness properties of log-loss scoring [in footnote 175]), check out D. L. Dowe (2008a). Foreword re C. S. Wallace, Computer Journal (Oxford Univ Press), Vol. 51, No. 5 (Sept. 2008) [Christopher Stewart WALLACE (1933-2004) memorial special issue], pp523-560 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxm117 http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol51/issue5 www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld/David.Dowe.publications.html#Dowe2008a and search on (e.g.) ``footy'' or ``football''. The pointer to Chris Wallace on this e-mail list is quite pertinent, as he wrote the seminal Wallace & Boulton (1968) paper beginning the area of Minimum Message Length (MML) inductive inference, from which this (15 year-old) competition is a spin-off. Cheers (and apologies again for any cross-postings), David. Assoc. Prof. David Dowe, Ph.D.; School of Comp. Sci & Softw. Eng.; Clayton School of I.T.; Monash Univ.; Clayton; Vic 3168; Australia Tel:+61 3 9905-5776 www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxm117 http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol51/issue5 www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld/David.Dowe.publications.html#Dowe2008a
