Who Wins Patriots at Jaguars? A.I. Predicts

The best game of the week will take place in Florida, hands-down. It’ll be a rematch from last years AFC title game in the 2017 playoffs. The Jacksonville Jaguars and New England Patriots possess a mutual respect for each other on the field, but this weekend is all about unfinished business. Both teams beat their respective opponents in Week 1, but they’ve been eyeing this matchup since the official schedule release in the offseason.

Jacksonville boasts an elite defense yet — They’re loaded on every level. However, the Patriots have the luxury of claiming their quarterback as presumably the greatest player of all time. Tom Brady looks sharp, and last weeks performance against Houston shows that he, and the Patriot offensive, haven’t lost a step. Jacksonville must forget that blown game from last year, and enter this game mentally prepared to finish the fight.

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.

As the GIF above shows, the hive-mind concluded that New England should walk away as the victors after the highly-anticipated test during Week 2. That’s completely understandable, especially since Las Vegas is predicting the Patriots to end up as 1-point favorites on Sunday. It’s a primetime matchup, and the team that commits to limiting the fewest mistakes will end up winning the game. Many are predicting these two teams will face-off against each other again in January like last year, but the stakes are higher in both locker rooms because the winner will hold temporary bragging rights.

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