u/Worried-Animal-4044

Source code, analysis, and methodology: World-vs-Model

[OC] 2026 World Cup kicks off tomorrow - World-vs-model

Obviously built with the help of AI, but directed and orchestrated by human.

Data: real World Football Elo ratings (eloratings.net) + live, de-vigged Polymarket prices for the market baseline. Method: 20k Monte Carlo runs through the actual FIFA 2026 bracket (Round of 32 → Final), with Dixon-Coles goals correction and rating uncertainty.

Tool: Python + Pillow. Source: Polymarket (Gamma + CLOB APIs) for the market prices; a Monte-Carlo Elo simulation for the model. Each bar is a team's chance to win the Cup — teal = the market, violet = my model — with gold stars for past titles.

There's a live version that scores the model against the market as results come in:
mli3w.github.io/world-vs-model

Research/education only, not gambling.

Ahead of the 2026 World Cup I wanted a clean, honest test of "can a model beat a liquid market?". So I stamped two models' forecasts for every team — timestamped before kickoff, immutable — and I'm scoring them out-of-sample against the de-vigged Polymarket prices as results land.

Zero-knowledge: no football input at all, just a favorite–longshot correction on the market's own nested ladder. The honest baseline.
Informed (Elo): an independent Monte-Carlo of the bracket on real Elo ratings — host bonus, knockout-only shrink, per-sim rating uncertainty, Dixon–Coles goals. Never seeded from the market.

Scoring = Brier + skill-vs-market (my Brier minus the market's), from a predictions.jsonl ledger. Open-source; the board auto-rebuilds from live data.

Honest prior: I expect the market to be tough to beat and most big model-vs-market gaps to be model blind spots, not edges. Posting it because the falsifiable record is the interesting part — win or lose. Feedback very welcome.

🔗 https://mli3w.github.io/world-vs-model/ 💻 https://github.com/mli3w/world-vs-model
(Research/education only — not advice, not gambling, nothing staked.)

Built this for my sister-in-law’s son and my 4yo, called Top Sum.

It’s a small arcade-style browser game where you fly through the correct answers to solve math questions while flying over Marina Bay, Singapore.

As your streak builds:

• the game speeds up
• your plane upgrades
• one mistake breaks the multiplier

What surprised me was how quickly it stopped feeling like a worksheet and started feeling more like an actual arcade game.

A Zooom boost mode where 2 fighters fly to your side and do a fly-pass. Sunset mode shows MBS lightshows and fireworks.

Built with Three.js/WebGL and experimented a lot with AI-assisted prototyping using Claude Code during development.

Runs directly in browser on both mobile and desktop — no installation required.

Playable here:
https://mli3w.github.io/top-sum/

Source code:
https://github.com/mli3w/top-sum

Would genuinely love feedback from people here.