If the cost of producing even the sort of dry, statistics-heavy content the program presently excels at was a primary factor then we'd have outsourced it to India or the Philippines by now. You'd certainly pay less than $10 for an article like this:
http://www.builderonline.com/local-housing-data/new-england/...
I'm willing to believe the underlying machine learning technology is very clever, but I'm also willing to believe a specialised toy script could produce similar results, even if you had to hard code the minimum winning margin for a "rout".
As for the Freakonomics comparison, they seem to have missed the appeal of Levitt: that his ability to posit a plausible causal relationship between two apparently unrelated variables. Any idiot can summarise "remarkable findings" based on spurious correlations.
I'm willing to believe the underlying machine learning technology is very clever, but I'm also willing to believe a specialised toy script could produce similar results, even if you had to hard code the minimum winning margin for a "rout".
As for the Freakonomics comparison, they seem to have missed the appeal of Levitt: that his ability to posit a plausible causal relationship between two apparently unrelated variables. Any idiot can summarise "remarkable findings" based on spurious correlations.