Question: What happens when you give some HP (Hewlett Packard) scientists 3 million tweets, and
the names of 25 movie titles?
Answer: A algorithm that can predict the box office take of a movie on the opening weekend.
As if Twitter was not already fast becoming a new and preferred method of getting news, especially breaking
news, scientists have started to figure out patterns, speed, and the mood of a tweet to determine
all sorts of interesting social pin marks on that social experiment
poster board we call life.
The algo appears to come very close at times. One example was it predicts a take of $30.71 million
dollars for the movie on the first weekend, and in fact it did $30.46 million.
Sometimes science IS crazier then life. While this might not mean much to any of us, you
have to figure some of the big movie studios are dying to get a hold of that algo to figure out
how they might do.
BBC Article:
here
- Scott