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 frankly unreasonable amount of FIFA 2002, on what was technically my dad’s laptop.

Then in 2010 I watched the World Cup for the first time. I didn’t catch every full match, but I remember my dad telling me about an octopus that could predict the results, and I was mesmerized. An octopus, calling the World Cup. It was the craziest thing I’d ever heard.

AIXI is my attempt to share that. 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. No hindsight, no edits. Just calls, on the record, against what actually happened.

It’s a tribute as much as a contest. Paul set a bar that’s frankly impossible, and these models almost certainly won’t clear it. But watching them try, and seeing which one keeps its nerve on the big calls, is the entire point.

On the human side: 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.