iPhone app created for psychic German octopus
After a cephalopod "predicted" the outcome of multiple World Cup soccer games, an iPhone app development company has created a tribute app.
Earlier this month, an octopus named Paul living in a tank in Oberhausen, Germany, proved capable of successfully "predicting" the results of his home nation's World Cup soccer matches--and then went a step further and correctly selected Spain as the winner of the final.
Of course, there's now an app for that.
An iPhone app development company called uTouchLabs just released an app called "Ask the Octopus," which lets users input two options for any query and then has a cartoon "octopus oracle" choose one much in the way that Paul would gravitate toward one of the two flags with which he was presented.
It costs 99 cents in the App Store.
The app does not, however, give users an option to kill the octopus if they don't like what he has to say. That may sound brutal, but the option reared its ugly head as the World Cup drew to a close: Paul's predictions were taken so seriously that when he finally (and correctly) predicted a Germany loss, there were widespread outcries for him to be chopped up and baked into a delightful seafood paella. We can only hope that the honorary iPhone app's decision-making expertise is never met with such vitriol.