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Thursday, July 15, 2010

Paul the Octopus Gets His Own (Unofficial) iPhone App

You know that German octopus who successfully predicted all those World Cup games? He’s back in the form of an iOS app that makes predictions about anything you want it to, not just football.

The uTouchLabs-developed app is called “Ask the Octopus” [iTunes link] and it’s available in the App Store for the iPhone,iPod touch and iPad (though it doesn’t have a special iPad version).

It’s pretty basic. When you start it up, you see an animated octopus, and you’re asked to enter in two things to compare (Soup or salad? Paper or plastic? Jacob or Edward? We’re sure you can think of better things to compare). After you’ve picked the options, the octopus drifts to the sea floor and selects a box, just like Paul. It’s random, of course — we don’t believe this octopus has secret predictive powers, but like a Magic 8-Ball, it’s fun to play with.

You wouldn’t call the real Paul’s selections random, though. Surely, he had some reasons for them, but who knows what they were. Whatever his animal methodology, he at least got incredibly lucky, accurately predicting the winners of seven German World Cup matches, then picking Spain as the winner over the Netherlands in the final.

What do you think? Was he legit or did he just really like the colors yellow and red?

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