SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for chromas
The Clinton presidential campaign used a complex computer algorithm called Ada to assist in many of the most important decisions during the race.
According to aides, a raft of polling numbers, public and private, were fed into the algorithm, as well as ground-level voter data meticulously collected by the campaign. Once early voting began, those numbers were factored in, too.
What Ada did, based on all that data, aides said, was run 400,000 simulations a day of what the race against Trump might look like. A report that was spit out would give campaign manager Robby Mook and others a detailed picture of which battleground states were most likely to tip the race in one direction or another — and guide decisions about where to spend time and deploy resources.
Of course, the results are only as good as the data. Since the outcome of the election was different than most poll predictions, it seems like Ada may have had a Garbage In, Garbage Out problem.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday November 19 2016, @09:20PM
I think this is an unfortunate name collision, as I can't see anyone using Ada for this; it was likely written in R if I had to take a guess. As someone who actually uses and enjoys coding in Ada though, its great when you need to get it right the first time, and you're willing to build a program for mass distribution. An in-house tool is overkill.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday November 19 2016, @09:51PM
I prefer Haskell as my tool of choice for "must not fail". I've not much experience with Ada, but the fact that it has null pointers weakens the "get it right the first time" argument. Any language with a NULL type has a flawed type system.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!