Luck of Paul the Octopus came down to statistics

PAUL THE Octopus had a great run during the summer, correctly predicting the World Cup final result and the results of seven other matches. But does this show the tentacled creature was wonderfully clever or just remarkably lucky in his predictions from his aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany?

It is all down to statistics, according to Dr John Donovan and Paul Curran, lecturers in the school of engineering at the Institute of Technology Sligo.

The two co-presented a talk last night entitled Fun with Statistics. While number crunching of this kind might not be your first choice when stirring up a bit of fun, certainly the subject can help us understand probability and chance.

“Statistics is very important in everyday life and we try to relate it to everyday life,” Mr Curran said in advance of the talk last night.

For example, he said statistics alone confirmed that the V2 rockets raining down on London during the second World War were not guided devices and landed randomly, an analysis achieved using something called a “Poisson distribution”.

Dr Donovan cited an example of the power of statistics in something he called “birthday bingo”. It might seem improbable but you only need 23 individuals to reach a 50/50 probability that two of those 23 will share a birthday.

Statistics also had a “dark side”, Dr Donovan said, as demonstrated in the infamous case of Dr Roy Meadow. Used as a medical expert in abuse cases, he declared that the likelihood of a cot death was one in about 8,400 but the chance of two was one in 73 million, a statistic that helped to convict UK lawyer Sally Clark of the murder of her babies.

The conviction was overturned after Meadow was shown to have erred in the way he used his statistics, with two cot deaths in a single family far more likely than unlikely, Dr Donovan said.

So what of Paul the Octopus and his predictions? Sorry to say but chance helped him choose, Mr Curran declared. You have a one in 256 chance of matching the octopus’s achievement if you did no more than toss a coin.

And if that still seems a long shot for a cephalopod, consider that people were using crocodiles, pygmy rhinos and thousands of other animals to predict the match outcomes.

“If you had thousands of animals around the world some of them had to be right,” he said.

We didn’t hear anything about those that got it wrong. “We heard about the octopus because he got it right.”