Science

Who Will Win Eagles vs. Buccaneers? A.I. Predicts

The Week 2 match-up between Philly and Tampa Bay looks good for the reigning champs.

Flickr / 7beachbum

A superstitious Philadelphia Eagles team isn’t straying from its home colors, and Sunday will be the seventh game in a row that the team will be in green as they look to continue their winning ways. Meanwhile, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers look to keep up a another short-lived tradition of their own by starting Ryan Fitzpatrick over franchise quarterback Jameis Winston.

To predict the result of this Week 2 match-up, Unanimous A.I. used what’s known as swarm intelligence to forecast the week’s slate. A group of NFL fans worked together as a hive mind to make picks. As you can see in the animation below, each participant controlled a little golden magnet and used it to drag the puck toward the answer they thought was the most likely outcome. As the users saw the puck move toward a particular outcome, it triggers a psychological response. They readjust their decision-making, building toward a consensus.

A hive-mind of 27 NFL enthusiasts have worked together to pick Philadelphia to win this Week 2 match-up, and they’re feeling confident — 71 percent in fact — about their prediction.

Unanimous A.I. has made some scarily accurate predictions in the past using swarm intelligence, as our previous article explains. For instance, the swarm picked this year’s Oscar winners with 94 percent accuracy. Here’s Unanimous A.I. founder Louis Rosenberg explaining swarm intelligence at a recent TEDx Talk.

In related news, Unanimous A.I. recently presented a scientific study of its ability to forecast games in the National Hockey League. In a 200-game, 20-week-long study of its Swarm AI in the NHL, it was able to easily outperform Las Vegas expectations, and its “Pick of the Week” was right 85 percent of the time, producing a 170 percent ROI. The paper, titled “Artificial Swarm Intelligence versus Vegas Betting Markets,” was presented at the at the IEEE Developments in eSystems Engineering Conference (DeSE 2018) this month at Downing College in Cambridge, England. In a press release issued with the study, co-author Gregg Wilcox says the technology can be applied to matters outside sports, too. “While it’s fun to predict sports, we are currently applying the same techniques to a wide variety of other domains, including financial forecasting, business forecasting, and medical diagnosis, all with positive results.”

Want to join the hive mind that picks NFL matches every week? Sign up to participate in future predictions

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