Here’s an interesting article about how a computer simulation run 10,000 times has determined that while Peyton Manning and the Colts will win Superbowl XLI, they will not cover the spread. For those scoring (betting) at home, Accuscore predicts that the game will come down to the wire with Indianopolis prevailing by about a field goal.

What struck me as interesting was the methodology: they don’t just base their simulations on player statistics, but consider many different factors. From the article…

”We don’t input any stats into our engine,” [COO Gibby] McCaleb said. ”I can’t go into too much detail because of our intellectual property, but we actually play the game one play at a time.

”Stats are completely misleading. Weather, field position, score, time on the clock, coaching tendencies — you name it, it’s in there. This is why our simulation engine is so complex and takes days to run a full NFL season.”

It’s a far cry from how the engine originally was conceived.

”In studying evolution, I worked on … simulations where a population’s segment of DNA was modeled one generation at a time,” Oh said. ”Each generation [featured] things like mortality rates, birth rates, mutation rates and population movement rates, which were used to simulate how each generation ‘lived.’

”To determine what these rates are, we reviewed extensive research by geneticists, mathematicians, archeologists and anthropologists. The evolutionary program would use the average rates and variability to simulate a single generation. It would then simulate the same sample for a predetermined number of generations and output how this population looks ‘genetically.”’