The Steem-Oracle project: Harnessing the Wisdom of Steemians!

Note: For those busy people out there, this post comes with a "TL;DR" section right at the end. So scroll to the bottom if you do not want to read the entire post.

Hello Steemians! I have recently finished reading a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki. The book illustrated how wisdom of crowd can potentially be better than individual expert's opinion. Given the right conditions, collective intelligence seems to be able to consistently beat individual brilliance. As an example, the book highlighted that "Asking the audience" is the best lifeline in the popular TV game show "Who wants to be a millionaire". Based on statistics, the audience is right 91% of the time. Another example cited was the classic experiment by Jack Treynor. In the experiment, 56 people were tasked to estimate the number of Jelly Beans in a jar. Of which, the group of people were able to achieve an average estimate that was within 3% of the correct number of beans in a jar.

Many other examples are provided in the book and I encourage you to pick up the book if you have the time. The concept on crowd wisdom is also mentioned in Steem Bluepaper, and that is the fundamental idea behind Steem's voting system. Quoted from the Bluepaper,

The first is a pool of tokens dedicated to incentivizing content creation and curation (called the “rewards pool”). The second is a voting system that leverages the wisdom of the crowd to assess the value of content and distribute tokens to it. These two unique properties when combined are referred to as Proof-of-Brain, which is an entendre based on Proof-of-Work, meant to emphasize the human work required to distribute tokens to community participants

4 conditions for accurate Wisdom of Crowds

In order for the crowd to be an accurate predictor, the 4 conditions below must be met:

• Diversity of opinion (each person should have some private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts)
• Independence (people’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them)
• Decentralization (people are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge)
• Aggregation (some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision)

Seems like a perfect description of Steem isn't it?

Source

Introducing Steem-Oracle project: Harnessing the Wisdom of Steemians!

Based on the recent statistics from @arcange, there are about 20,000 active authors in the past 30 days. This potentially represents 1 big collective intelligence! In order to be sure that we, Steemians, have the collective intelligence to predict real-world events, we need to test it out. And thus, the Steem-Oracle project is hatched! I will be creating a series of contests/games to predict the outcome of real-life events. The contests/games will be posted by the @steem-oracle account, which I created for this project. So please give it a follow if you are interested to contribute to the Wisdom of Steemians!

First Experiment: World Cup 2018 Match Results Predictions

With World Cup 2018 starting on 14 June, it is the ideal stage for us to test the Wisdom of Steemians! Hence, I will be organizing a series of contests to predict the results of 32 matches in this coming World Cup:

• All 16 matches in the knockout stage
• 16 selected matches in the group stage

The first contest will be posted tomorrow, 13 June 2018. At the end of these 32 rounds of predictions, the results will be analyzed and we shall see if the Wisdom of Steemians is viable in making real world predictions.

Selected group stage matches:

Group A:

• Egypt vs Uruguay, 15 Jun
• Uruguay vs Russia, 25 Jun

Group B:

• Portugal vs Spain, 15 Jun
• Portugal vs Morocco, 20 Jun

Group C:

• France vs Peru, 21 Jun
• Denmark vs France, 26 Jun

Group D:

• Croatia vs Nigeria, 16 Jun
• Argentina vs Croatia, 21 Jun

Group E:

• Brazil vs Switzerland, 17 Jun
• Serbia vs Switzerland, 22 Jun

Group F:

• Germany vs Mexico, 17 Jun
• Sweden vs Korea, 18 Jun

Group G:

• Belgium vs Tunisia, 18 Jun
• England vs Belgium, 28 Jun

Group H:

• Columbia vs Japan, 19 Jun
• Poland vs Columbia, 24 Jun

Incentivizing Steemians to participate

In order to encourage Steemians to participate, there must be incentives to do so. The incentives and rules are designed to encourage the following:

• Continuous participation through all 32 rounds of prediction contests
• Reward accurate predictions but provide better reward for accurate collective predictions (i.e. giving more rewards if Wisdom of Steemians is proven accurate)
• Get as much participation as possible

To provide incentives for Steemians to participate, here are the rewards (information of rewards will be included in each contest post):

• If the crowd gets it right: 90% of all SBD + STEEM rewards from contest posts will be distributed to Steemians who predicted the result correctly
• If the crowd is wrong: 50% of all SBD + STEEM rewards from contest posts will be distributed to Steemians who predicted the result correctly
• The remaining SBD + STEEM rewards of each contest will be added into a Grand Pool which will be used to reward the overall top 10 predictors
• Top 10 predictors will also receive auto upvotes from @culgin and @steem-oracle for the next 30 days after overall results are announced

Rules to participate in the contests

The same set of rules will be included in each contest post. Rules below,

• Upvote the contest post with at least 30% voting strength
• Resteem the contest post is highly encouraged but not mandatory
• Reply the post with your pick. Just your pick and no other words. (e.g. For Spain vs Portugal. Just reply Spain or Portugal or Tie)
• Entries must be submitted before match starts. Editing of entry, after the match has started, will void the entry.
• There must be at least 20 entries for contest to be valid (so get as many people to join as possible!)
• If there are insufficient entries, SBD + STEEM rewards will be added to the Grand Pool

TL;DR

• Follow @steem-oracle for upcoming World Cup match prediction contests. First contest starts tomorrow, 13 Jun 2018.
• Follow @culgin for updates on "Steem-Oracle" project
• Read the rules
• Have fun, win rewards and contribute to the Wisdom of Steemians!

This is the first project I have ever started on Steem and I need all the support I can get. If you like this initiative, kindly upvote and resteem. Thanks for reading and I look forward to your active participation. Steem on everyone!

[UPDATES]

First 3 contest posts are out:

• Egypt vs Uruguay
• Portugal vs Spain
• Croatia vs Nigeria

Rules update:

• I forgot to add that, STEEM rewards will also be distributed the same way as SBD rewards
• Resteeming contest post is not mandatory but highly encouraged

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