Predicting catastrophe, and other guessing games: Prof Herbert Huppert's recent talk

Can you predict when a major earthquake will strike? How much will global sea level rise as ice sheets melt? How many test runs did Allan Border make over his cricketing career?

These and other questions were the subject of a Faculty of Science colloquium on Wednesday 10 April presented by Herbert Huppert (University of Cambridge and UNSW) in a talk entitled “Expert Elicitation: how to estimate the weight of a bull or manage the next disaster”. Professor Huppert, a Fellow of the Royal Society, is a Distinguished Professor at the School of Mathematics and Statistics and a world-renowned expert on fluid dynamics, geophysics, and applied mathematics. 

Expert elicitation is a method for pooling expert opinions to estimate the degree of consensus within the scientific community. The method is particularly useful when there is uncertainty due to a lack of data or the underlying physical processes are imperfectly known - as is the case with the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheets. Expert elicitation can also provide a valuable “educated guess” about rare but dangerous events like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or biological attacks.  

Expert elicitation is an example of the “wisdom of crowds”, the idea that predictions made by groups are often better than those made by individuals. A famous example involves guessing the weight of an ox at a county fair: the average of all of the guesses is typically much closer to the right answer than any individual guess. 

Professor Huppert closed his presentation by eliciting the expert (and not-so-expert) opinions of the audience on Australian history, geography, and sports trivia. As for the total number of test runs by “A.B.”? Your guess is as good as mine. 

Shane Keating, Lecturer, School of Mathematics and Statistics.