Puella Magi Madoka Magica will win a Nihon Taisho SF award

Created by gwern on 2011-11-21; known on 2012-01-01; judged wrong by gwern on 2012-01-03.

• gwern estimated 60% on 2011-11-21
• gwern said “ann: http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2011/11/18-1/madoka-magica-anime-nominated-for-sf-award bg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon_SF_Taisho_Award” on 2011-11-21
• gwern said “note that there are 5 nominees, so max-ent is 20%; I’m going to 60% because Madoka was monstrously popular even though the SF aspects are either not very original or relatively minor bits” on 2011-11-21
• JoshuaZ estimated 55% on 2011-11-21
• Anubhav estimated 30% and said “Seeing as a few popular SF anime I can think of off the bat (SAC, Lain) aren’t represented, I doubt something with a few marginal SF elements can win based on popularity alone. (BTW, Madoka but no S;G? Odd… )” on 2011-11-30
• gwern estimated 45% and said “hm, good point. Steins;gate was a fantastic SF anime, one of the best ever and much better SF than Madoka; started airing the same time AFAIK, so that’s not it.” on 2011-11-30
• Anubhav said “‘Steins;gate was a fantastic SF anime, one of the best ever [citation needed]’. FTFY. Seriously though, let’s not start pointless flamewars here. Especially not over anime. ” on 2011-11-30
• gwern said “Anime is the very best thing to flamewar over, as are semantics (but not syntax).” on 2011-11-30
• gwern said “lost to ‘Karyū no miya by Sayuri Ueda’ :(” on 2012-01-03
• gwern said “Chattoraj: incidentally, I looked it up and S;G was ineligible because the visual novel had come out a year or two before” on 2012-01-03
• gwern   judged this prediction wrong on 2012-01-03.