The 2016 Rio Olympic Games is right around the corner, so it is the perfect time to talk a bit about how we can use science to predict the results. Daniel Johnson, a professor of microeconomics at the Colorado College created a simple prediction model, that, over the past 5 Olympic Games, was able to achieve 94% agreement between the predicted and actual medal counts per nation. What is even more amazing is that the model doesn’t even take into consideration the athletic abilities of any of these contenders.
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The paper “A Tale of Two Seasons: Participation and Medal Counts
at the Summer and Winter Olympic Games” is available here:
A media article about this on Forbes:
The Olympics subreddit is available here:
From an earlier episode:
Two Minute Papers – Narrow Band Liquid Simulations –
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