PREDICTION, wrote Karl Popper, a philosopher, is “one of the oldest dreams of mankind—the dream of prophecy, the idea that we can know what the future has in store for us, and that we can profit from such knowledge by adjusting our policy to it.” It is a dream from which Donald Trump provided a shock awakening.

Over the summer of 2015, as Mr Trump surged in primary polls, analysts and journalists laid out, often in precise and gory detail, the steep trajectory of his inevitable fall. “Why the Republican Party shouldn’t worry about the Donald” and “Donald Trump’s Six Stages Of Doom” are representative headlines from those months. A year later, in an arena in Cleveland, Mr Trump accepted his party’s nomination.

But he didn’t stand a chance in the general, according to the people for whom predicting these sorts of things is their business. On the morning of November 8th, the Huffington Post gave Hillary Clinton a 98% chance of being elected president. The Princeton Election Consortium gave her a 93% chance. The New York Times arrived at 85%, and FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism website (where your blogger is employed part-time), at a more tempered 71%. But at 3am the next day, in a Hilton ballroom in Midtown Manhattan, Mr Trump delivered his victory speech.

This bloody face-plant into the cold cement of unpredictability will do little to deter future prognosticative efforts, however. Indeed, they’re already well underway. If humankind couldn’t predict Mr Trump, perhaps it can predict what Mr Trump will do.

For instance: What does the future of the Supreme Court hold? The court has been shorthanded since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia last February. Congressional Republicans successfully ignored Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, for ten months, leaving Mr Trump with a powerful political card to play. What will he draw out of the deck?

There have been some official hints already. In May, Mr Trump released a list of 11 potential nominees to the court, assembled with the assistance of the conservative Heritage Foundation. In September, he augmented it with 10 more. In early January, those 21 were whittled down to a shortlist of eight, according to Politico.

But one project is gazing more deeply at the judicial tea leaves. FantasyJustice is a crowd-sourced prediction market of sorts, offering a menu of potential Trump justices, on which visitors to its website can vote. It’s an offshoot of FantasySCOTUS—fantasy sports but for predicting Supreme Court opinions. (For the most recent full term, its experts boasted an 84% accuracy rate.) Thousands have weighed in, and three favourite contenders for the vacant seat have emerged.

Neil Gorsuch, a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, is in the lead with about 18% of the total vote. Mr Gorsuch has the sort of East Coast, silk-stocking CV that’s largely missing from Mr Trump’s shortlist. A George W. Bush appointee, Mr Gorsuch clerked for two Supreme Court justices—Byron White and Anthony Kennedy—and collected degrees from Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford.

William Pryor, a judge on the 11th circuit, comes in a close second with 15%. Mr Pryor, spotted recently at Trump Tower, is the proud owner of sparkling constitutional conservative credentials. He has called Roe v Wade, for example, the “worst abomination in the history of constitutional law.”

Rounding out the top tier on FantasyJustice, with 14% of the vote, is David Stras, an associate justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Mr Stras, unlike the other two, does not appear on Mr Trump’s shortlist. A Tim Pawlenty appointee, he went to law school at the University of Kansas, and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas.

Yet one can almost hear the distant cries from the able jurists whose faces didn’t appear in FantasyJustice’s crystal ball: “Fake news! It’s rigged!” And they might be right.

Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law, is on the team that created FantasyJustice. When the site first launched, he noticed certain individual users flooding the system with multiple votes, skewing the results. So FantasyJustice introduced a restriction: only one vote per unique IP address. But then the botnets struck. Traffic was routed through servers in Korea and elsewhere, creating the illusion of multiple voters where there was not, Mr Blackman said. Why would someone spend the time, and quite possibly money, to flood and influence a prediction site like this? “The answer is obvious,” Mr Blackman said. “Donald Trump loves polls.”

Whether the responsible parties were former law clerks, diehard fans of a given circuit court, or just the otherwise judicially interested, the theory goes that Mr Trump is especially susceptible to public opinion. Therefore, whether it’s a Fox News flash-poll, a count of Twitter followers, the sales of dresses, or even an out-of-the-way crowd-sourced justice prediction site, perhaps routing a little traffic through Asian servers might provide a small backdoor of influence to the leader of the free world.

So, now add botnets to the mountain of challenges of Trump prediction. The difficulty of Supreme Court prediction may also extend beyond the identity of the new ninth justice and to its decisions themselves. In a working paper from early this year, Mr Blackman and two colleagues constructed a model for predicting opinions. It does fairly well—over 70% accuracy over 28,000 cases it was tested on dating back to 1816. In the last decade or so, however, roughly corresponding to the Roberts court, the team observed a marked decline in the model’s accuracy.

Mr Blackman added: “The question we don’t know is: Is this an outlier or is this the new normal?”