TL;DR: "journalist" rides on the AI hype bandwagon to get eyeballs on an article about a software that churns variables using to calculate which horse is the fa

TL;DR: "journalist" rides on the AI hype bandwagon to get eyeballs on an article about a software that churns variables using to calculate which horse is the fastest on races. > In the early 1970s — armed with sharpened pencils, a mini calculator, large sheets of paper, tall stacks of the Daily Racing Form and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s — Beyer performed his painstaking work. By carefully and thoroughly accounting for the biases of tracks and adjusting horses’ clocked times accordingly, he collapsed the complications down into a single number: a speed figure. Speed figures allowed for reliable comparisons between California horses and Florida horses, between five furlongs and six, between a lowly claiming race and a big-money graded stakes. > [...] The approach became so ingrained that Beyer Speed Figures now appear in bold type in the Daily Racing Form, alongside every horse’s every race. The CAW syndicates, McKeever’s EquinEdge and many other recent projects are direct descendants of Beyer’s pencil-and-paper calculations. > [...] McKeever gave me access to EquinEdge, and I fired it up one night in my apartment. I also deposited $100 on a betting site and pulled up a multicast of live races around the country. I intended to follow EquinEdge’s suggestions to make my wagers. > [...] I’d cashed four juicy tickets in a row and, within less than half an hour, doubled my money. > [...] The next night was different. Longshot after longshot, none of them on my radar or the algorithm’s, pulled away down the stretch. At one point, I lost three consecutive races on photo finishes. My winnings evaporated and I went bust. God is dead.