Microsoft today said BJP will bag 228 of the 543 seats and their national alliance, the NDA, to carry 270 seats against the ruling party Congress’ 87 seats and its alliance, the UPA 110 during 2014 India elections.
The Third Front alliance is expected to carry 80 seats. 83 seats will go to smaller parties that are not formally aligned with any of the three major alliances, said the Indian Elections Game, a joint work of Microsoft Research India.
The number of Indian eligible voters was 814 million. The final voting for the India’s general election ended at 6:30 PM local time on Monday, May 12.
The final election results will be released on Friday, May 16.
Microsoft said it released the Indian Elections Game before voting began on April 7 and ran through today’s final voting day.
Nearly 4,000 users created their predictions on the number of seats that any given party, or combination of parties, would get in any of the 35 voting states and union territories.
As the crowd makes predictions on the outcome of all 35 voting states, the back end of the game examines the crowd’s predictions and creates the probability of any given outcome occurring.
Since game’s aggregation of the crowd’s predictions currently concludes there was just less than 50 percent likelihood of this combination occurring, a prediction that wagered 1 point on BJP getting 4 or 5 seats and Congress getting 0 or 1 seat would yield 2.28 points if correct and 0 points if incorrect, said David Rothschild of Microsoft in his blog post.
Computing the probability was not trivial, as the game had to learn how the different parties interacted within a given district and between districts. And, unlike the United States where there are just two major parties, there is large number of viable parties, some national and some regional, competing for the 543 seats.
Microsoft clarified that the national party predictions have a margin of error plus or minus 7 percent of seats and the national alliances plus or minus 10 percent of seats.
This prediction is generated by considering each voting states independently and then considering how they aggregate up together.
