India, May 16 -- "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

That's a quote attributed to Yogi Berra, the American baseball catcher, manager and coach. Others, including physicist Niels Bohr and filmmaker Samuel Goldwyn, have made similar observations.

Predicting future trends has long been an obsession with humans. One of the earliest future-trend predictors was the priestess Pythia at Delphi, in Ancient Greece. She was revered for her prescience on war and other matters of state.

Pythia actually lives on, in modern boardrooms, as the much-revered Delphi Technique, in which a team is made to predict future outcomes, individually, and through repeated rounds arrive at a "most probable" future prediction.

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