Did you know about Paul the Octopus who could predict soccer matches? Since 2008, Paul the psychic octopus has been correctly picking the right team that will win the world cup soccer matches especially Germany in a German zoo. It works like this: to make Paul predict the right match, the zoo keepers in Germany present him with two transparent boxes, each of them labeled with the flag of the competing countries and loaded with a tasty mussel to eat. Depending on which one Paul selects first to eat, is the country that wins the soccer game.
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Does Paul know about soccer ? No.
Can he unscrew bottle lids? Yes, the octupus is one of the most intelligent species in the invertebrate world.
Does he predict correctly? Yes, most of the time.
Paul predicted 8 out of 8 games in the FIFA world cup of 2010, which converts to 1 chance in 256.
Probabilities are a concept that we learn during school with a coin toss. If you toss an unbiased coin, then it has an equal probability of falling on either side with heads or tails. Thus predicting 8 straight matches equals 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 1 chance in 256.
Just from the sheer odd nature of the prediction, there have been numerous articles written about Paul which are convinced that based on sheer statistics Paul was a psychic. A good web search will bring up several articles about his incredible ability. And the more one data mine’s Paul’s correlations with World cup results, the convincing it gets that Paul had some innate ability (the correlation coefficient is incredible!).After all how could this be possible any other way? So what gives?
It turns out that Paul was in a German Zoo and mostly presented with the German flag to predict the outcome of German matches. It also turns out that octopus like horizontal lines and picked up the German flag for its horizontal lines. Though the octopus cannot see color, if you look at the German flag shown below you realize the image processing in the Octopus eye. Each time it picked up the German flag, it got the tasty treat. Pretty soon, it learned to pick up the German flag first.
Somehow, the Octopus gets attracted to the lines, where it also finds food and selects the flag. Curiously, the other times that it has selected the flag, it selected Spain which has similar pattern to the German flag.
And other times, it was the Serbian flag which was also very similar.
Thus though the data showed that there was a strong correlation between Octopus picking the right winner and the winner of the soccer game, the conclusion to ascribe it to image processing in the Octopus eye was only possible once the processing in the Octopus eye was understood. Thus, finding correlative data should be a starting point for more investigation rather than a conclusion.