The Story

Hi, I’m Caleb Sakala, and I built this. I’m from Zambia, and I’ve been a football fan for about as long as I could understand what being a fan of anything even means.

As a kid my room was plastered with posters I’d ripped straight out of books: Kaká, Ronaldinho, Rooney, Raheem Sterling, Neymar. I read every football book I could get my hands on, and I played a lot of FIFA 2002 on my dad’s laptop.

Then in 2010 I watched the World Cup for the first time. I didn’t watch every match, but I remember my dad telling me about an octopus that could predict the results, and I was mesmerized. An octopus… predicting the World Cup? Was it magic? Coincidence? Facade? It was the craziest thing I’d ever heard.

AIXI is my attempt to share that wonder from my childhood with the world. Paul, sadly, isn’t around anymore, so I’m paying my respects with a tank full of digital octopi instead: five AI models that step up before each match, commit to their lineups and scorelines, and then get graded by reality. I have a hunch that asking them just to predict the winner would be far too boring — but we’ll see how good they are at even that.

This website is a tribute as much as it is a contest. Paul set a bar that is literally at the mark of perfection, and these models may not clear it or come close. But watching them try, and seeing which one keeps its nerve on the big calls, is like reliving that 2010 World Cup all over again.

To any software devs here: I recently graduated valedictorian of my software class, and projects like this are how I most like to learn: find something that makes me curious, then actually build it.