This is a little bit computerish but the principles still work if you think of it in terms of pen and paper (it's just quicker with a computer).

Right, you have a database (or a lot of sheets of paper) with thousands of races in it and each race has (say) twelve factors associated with each horse in it. Maybe one for the horses perceived form before the race, another for let's say it's jockey, another for the weight it carries, and so on. Each of these factors is a number.
To illustrate with an example I'll use a two horse race and only show two of the factors.

Horse 1 I'M A TRYER Form 3, Jockey Factor 5
Horse 2 ALWAYS FIRST Form 7, Jockey Factor 3
(Horse 1 has a better jockey but it appears horse 2 has had better recent form).

We can take each of these 12 factors and multiply them by a number from 0 to 5. We have to multiply them by the same number in all the races and for all the horses (bit like the neurals really).
In the example above we might choose to multiply the form factor by 2 and the Jockey factor by 5 and we would get:

I'M A TRYER (Form 3 * 2) (Jockey 5 * 5) giving a total of 31
ALWAYS FIRST (Form 7 * 2) (Jockey 3 * 5) giving a total of 29

So if we use 2 for form and 5 for jockey we would predict that I'M A TRYER would win the race.
Now if we had used 3 for form and 4 for jockey we would get:

I'M A TRYER (Form 3 * 3) (Jockey 5 * 4) giving a total of 29
ALWAYS FIRST (Form 7 * 3) (Jockey 3 * 4) giving a total of 33

This would predict that ALWAYS FIRST would win the race.

Now the challenge is this -----

We have to pick the numbers that we are going to multiply each factor by (I used 2 and 5 in my first example), that's 12 numbers for our imaginary database. Then we have to go through the thousands of races and multiply each horses factors by these 12 numbers (Just like I did for the two horse race but more horses and more factors and numbers). Quite a job, but a computer can do it in a few seconds. At the end of all this multiplying and adding we tally up how many times we picked the real winner of the race and if we'd had a bet on each one how much we would have won (or lost). Maybe with our first set of 12 numbers we picked 15% of the winners and lost half our stake money.
Well we think, we can do better than this. So we use a new set of 12 numbers to multiply these factors by. Woohoo, this time we come up with 18% of the winners and only lose a quarter of our stake money. Maybe if we tried every possible combination of those 12 numbers (each one from 0 to 5) we would find a combination that got 30% of the winners and made us a profit.

This is the real challenge ----- (I was just trying to stop you dropping off to sleep last time I said this).
How do we find the best combination of 12 numbers - each number from 0 to 5 - which gives us the best return for our money. Wesmip reckons there are 2,176,782,336 combinations. Without a project like CETI we aren't going to be able to try them all even if each takes only a second to run through.

What do we do?

It's only fair to add that I don't know the answer. However if anyone has suggestions I can possibly try them out (as can Wesmip I suspect) and share the path to the Holy Grail with the winner.

If you got this far, congratulations.

KV