Talent vs. Luck – A recreation of the paper's model
Talent vs. Luck – A recreation of the paper's model launched on March 15, 2018 with 86 votes, #490 of 2,954 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 8 years on.
In plain words
This project recreates a research model exploring how randomness influences success and failure in competitive environments. It's for anyone interested in understanding the role of luck versus talent in achieving outcomes. The creator rebuilt the model from an academic paper to verify findings and explore additional questions, providing both the methodology and comparative results.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
I recently came across the paper titled Talent vs Luck: the role of randomness in success and failure , by A. Pluchino. A. E. Biondo, A. Rapisarda, on Hacker News on Hackernews. After reading through both the Scientific American and checking out the paper itself, I decided to try and recreate the model to learn more about it and follow up on some questions I had about the paper’s findings. I go over my opinions on the paper’s findings in this companion post . In this post, I first review the model as I understand it, demonstrate how I was able to recreate it, and show that the results from my recreation have roughly the same features as the one in the paper. As a disclaimer, I should note…from joshuaballoch.github.io
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