Three computer scientists, Chenhao Tan, Lillian Lee and Bo Pang, have built an algorithm that also makes these guesses, as described in a recent paper, and the results are impressive. You can think of the pair of Gore tweets as a practice round for a 25-question quiz that The Upshot has created based on their algorithm. (The answer: Gore’s first tweet got more retweets).
That an algorithm can make these kinds of predictions shows the power of “big data.” It also illustrates a fundamental limitation of big data: Specifically, guessing which tweet gets retweeted is significantly easier than creating one that gets retweeted.
Originally published in the New York Times
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