The Bet Train
How one person and an AI built a football prediction system in public - every test, every failure, every fix. A new chapter every Monday.
A bad weekend leads to the discovery that Alix has been faithfully learning from a broken formula - and to the rule the whole project runs on: the machine reports, a human decides.
Form tops the first weekly leaderboard and is retired eleven days later, the low-confidence picks are thrown out on the evidence, and the app goes down.
The Bet Train is born as a staking challenge to £100,000, the big version lasts about half an hour, invented odds are thrown out, and the models get a scoreboard.
Andrew builds his own power rankings, moves the build out of a chat window - and within days the rankings are climbing while nobody plays.
A World Cup is on, the free data plan allows 100 requests a day, and the first version is built through a chat window in four days - most of them spent fixing it.
One person, an AI partner, a lot of football data - and a simple question: can a prediction system survive being measured in public?