The fruit fly will replace the octopus as an unreliable predictor of soccer match outcomes, if a new experiment succeeds. If the experiment fails, then Paul the Octopus will remain the false-gold standard of such prediction methods.
Roland Houben, the noted scientist/singer, alerts us to new research, of sorts, from the Martin Heisenberg group in the Rudolf Virchow Centre, DFG research centre for experimental biomedicine, at the University of Würzburg in Germany:
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has offered itself up as the new invertebrate oracle for football matches. Full of optimism, we have developed a new way to predict the exact outcome of matches using flies.
So far 20 matches have been played. Of these, 2 were predicted absolutely correctly, 4 almost correctly and 14 incorrectly.
These two videos show and tell, more or less, how the experiment works (or doesn’t):