Is your computer smarter than you?

If you are one of those people who hates maths and last punched a calculator button in anger on the last day of school aged 15, then I suggest that you move swiftly on to the next post because what follows will make for grim reading. Yes, you may have moved into the creative industries to blot out the memories of those dreary double maths lessons on a Monday morning - but it seems that the geeks are about to inherit the Earth. Well that's the prediction in Professor Ian Ayres's fascinating new book, Super Crunchers. How Anything can be Predicted.

Ayers shows how numbers are changing the way we work. We can hardly do anything now without generating data in a computer somewhere in the world. All our transactions are now being captured and we leave clues and trails about our movements on a daily basis in the form of data. As computers have become cheaper and more powerful, all these numbers can be crunched to produce some startling conclusions and results.

For example, Ayres shows how a company can mine film data to predict how much a film will take at the box office before a single frame has even been shot by comparing its plot with films that have already been produced. Epagogix, the company which provides the service, can calculate how much more or less a film will take at the box office by changing factors such as locations and actors.

One of the interesting results fom the company's calculations is that successful films do not necessarily rely on big stars. After all - who had heard of Harrison Ford before Star Wars?

In another example, Ayres shows how the gambling industry uses data to extract the most that it can out of individuals. The industry is encouraging the use of loyalty cards that can be topped up with credits which people use to play on slot machines. This means that all of their actions can be monitored, ie how much they have spent, won or lost. This allows the owners of the machines to build up a profile from historical patterns and know the point at which the losses are too great to bear and the player leaves. Now, the odds on the slot machines cannot be changed but the owners can be alerted when the player is nearing the point at which they are likely to leave. It is at this point that a friendly employee comes along with a nice treat such as a free meal in the restaurant for being such a loyal customer. The player then feels less pain and perhaps even happiness from getting a free meal and thinking that her odds are improving and bingo - they go back and spend more money on the slot machines.

Ayers gives many examples that show how we will all be affected by the number crunchers as consumers and employees and not all of them are sinister - there are some which are of social benefit.

If you want a taster of the book, there's a podcast of a lecture that Ayres gave at the London School of Economics (it's a long page so search for him by name). It's about 100 minutes - but well worth listening to the end.