Nearly everybody knows the principle but probably not by the mathematical name Occam's Razor.

In essence it is "when there are a number of different correct solutions to a problem choose the simplest".

The best racing applications that I can come up with right now are things like barrier tables.

Nearly every public analysis I've seen (including Don Scott) produces complicated tables which turn out to be wrong. That's because they only count from one side.

Barrier 6 might sometimes be an inner gate, and at other times the outer.

If instead you counted from the edges using -1, -2, -3 for the widest, 2nd widest etc. then you would spot important patterns that the others miss.

In particular you might spot cases where the widest gate is actually an advantage, and sometimes wide gates in general.

That info would simply be buried in the original more complicated tables.

The same technique also bears fruit for order of favouritism. The 6th favourite might be well in the money or actually the bolter.


Occam's Razor is actually used in real life for pattern recognition as illustrated here:


http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~soss/cs644...attern-rec.html