Statisticians at Play 

Today’s posting on Gelman’s stats blog included the poster below, announcing the 2025 ‘Predict the Cherry Blossoms’ Competition. You could enter too, but there is this:

“This year, contestants will not only compete against each other for the top prizes–but against artificial intelligence. We will include one or more submissions from the most popular large language models. Our AI handlers will prompt the AI with the contest rules and the entries from previous competitions. The handlers will then execute any code written by the AI as part of their entry. Judges will review all entries without knowing which were submitted by humans and which were written by AI.”

“Any human that beats the AI will receive commemorative memorabilia indicating they “beat the bot in the 2025 International Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition.”