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Market Researcher to harness Millions of Tea Leaf Predictions

13 January 2002, 17:63 GMT

Gonad forecaster Robbie Couch visits his guru

"It is quite possible that we have stumbled sublimely upon the future of the market research and predictions industry," Gonad senior researcher Robbie Couch announced.

"With the number of cups of tea being drunk around the world," he explained, "there are a huge number of ad-hoc predictions being made virtually all the time, quite often in parallel."

Gonad Group is all set to sponsor a "massively parallel tea-leaf data gathering initiative", a bit like the successful SETI@Home project, except with tea cups instead of PCs.

The tea cups will consist of a cleverly designed "fake bottom" that detects when the tea has been left inactive for more than fifteen minutes. The beverage is then assumed to have been finished. So the micro-electronic analyser embedded in the cup then gets to work, analyzing the pattern of tea leaf residue left in the cup.

The results are then automatically sent via a wireless device embedded in the cup's handle, to a local base station which will relay the results to Gonad's massive central data servers.

"If we can harness all these millions, literally millions of predictions that are made every day," Couch breathed excitedly, "then we can put them all into a massive database, analyse the predictions, and come up with some averages."

For example, a cup of tea drunk by a 76-year old lady in Mississippee, might predict that in a month's time, three green lizards will jump off a white picket fence and land in a bucket. Meanwhile, in Dover, Kent, England, a cup of tea drunk by a 53-year old spinster might make the exact same prediction (albeit perhaps with a slight variation, such as the number of lizards, or the type of receptacle that they are destined to drop into).

On the same day, a large man in Edinburgh, Scotland, might hastilly gulp down a mug of really strong tea before getting back to work on a building site. His carelessly discarded mug might contain the "casting vote" that confirms the true number of lizards - or it might make a completely unrelated prediction, sparking off a whole new thread, such as: by June 2004, over 40 billion people will be connected to the Internet via mobile bio-electronic devices implanted up their bottoms.

"The possibilities are endless," Couch breathed excitedly. However, the scheme has already come under intense fire from rival market research firms. Forrester spokesman Ted Grennet described the massively parallel tea-leaf initiative as "barking."

"I think all that aluminium has gone to [Couch's] brain and made him senile," he complained. "For one thing, imagine the sheer logistical nightmare of distributing all those special cups and maintaining the integrity of the results. I say it can't be done!"

Gonad's Couch remains bullish, however. "I say it can be done," he responded, "and I say it will be done by March 2003. It doesn't even matter if there is any truth in tea leaf based predictions, because it'll all be based on averaged-out results taken from millions, literally millions of leaf patterns gathered every day. Experience has shown that the most wildly innaccurate predictions can be smoothed out with that level of granularity."

"And don't get me started on our coffee granule scag program!" he added suddenly.

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