Mathematicians discover how to predict success in show business

Mathematicians at Queen Mary University in London have found a way to predict whether an actor's career has peaked or whether his most successful days are ahead.

They discovered that the most productive year of actors, defined as the year with the highest number of jobs credited, is towards the beginning of their career.

Clear signals preceding and following this annus mirabilis enable them to predict with a precision of about 85%, whether it is successful or not.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications also describes how the vast majority of actors and actresses, about 70%, have a career

These unique wonders are the norm rather than the exception because long careers with many jobs are rare, suggesting a scarcity of resources in the world of acting.

Using data presented by Internet Movie Database (IMDb), researchers studied the career of 1,512,472 actors and 896,029 actresses worldwide from 1888, the year of the first film, to 2016 to badyze and predict success on the big screen.

They discovered that these careers are re-grouped into "hot" and "cold" streaks, as individuals do not tend to work at a constant rate in a firm where the unemployment rate hovers around 90%.

There is also tremendous evidence of badism in the sector, as most of the models observed were different for actors and actresses.

For example, actors are more likely to find work after a cold spell, while the most productive year is the beginning of their career.

In addition, when careers last more than a year, it is more common to find shorter actresses than actors.

The researchers were inspired by this question after previous studies had badyzed the success of scientists and artists. to be unpredictable. Their goal was to define, quantify and predict the success of actors and actresses in terms of their ability to maintain a stable stream of jobs.

Oliver Williams, one of the authors of the Queen Mary University of London study, said: "Only a few of them will ever be awarded an Oscar or play the game of fame, but this is not important for the majority of actors and actresses who simply want to make a living, which is probably a better way to quantify the success of such events – a difficult industry.

"Our results shed light on the underlying social dynamics of the show and raise questions about the fairness of the system. Our predictive model for actors is also far from the randomness displayed for scientists and artists. "

The researchers found that the total number of jobs in a career is supported by a phenomenon that is growing more and more." In other words, the most well-known actors are getting the greatest number of jobs.

This result is not unexpected.After all, the more an actor is known, the more likely his producers will want in their next film, if only 39

What is interesting about this observation is that it is known that the effects of wealth and enrichment develop from arbitrary and unpredictable random events that occur. amplify, so that the success of an actor may be due to circumstances rather than its known as the network effect.

The study also shows that actors with long periods of cold, which then come back late, are rare but difficult to predict and, as such, the fate of each actor is not entirely determined.

million. Lucas Lacas, another author of the Queen Mary University study in London, said: "We believe that the approach and methods developed in this paper could be of interest to the film industry: for example, they could provide This also raises a number of open-ended questions: we badumed that nobody could do anything to change their fate, but we did not show that this should be the case. want to know how an individual could best improve his chances of success. "

The researchers hope that their method will contribute to the new science of success and that the improved versions of the prediction model will be even more precise.

Dr. Lacasa added, "This research has attracted a lot of attention from unexpected places, including a screenwriter in the film industry who is currently developing a film script based in part on our discoveries."