Who Wins Seahawks at Bears? A.I. Predicts

The Seattle Seahawks and the Chicago Bears walk into Monday Night Football in the same position: 0-1. The Bears had a disappointing Week 1, and after the starting the first half strong during against Green Bay, moving the ball well offensively and causing chaos on the defensive side of the ball, the second half was a different story. Aaron Rodgers limped back from a knee injury and did what he does best: devastate Bears fans.

The Seahawks also lost a heartbreaker in Week 1, but this was due largely to their lack of pass rush. Offseason departures of their core “Legion of Boom” defense gave the Broncos the opportunity to make decisions with plenty of time. Now both teams meet in a game won’t be played in desperation mode, but will come close.

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.

The swarm was left just as unsure of both of these teams as their Week 1’s would indicate. Though they ended up picking the Bears to cover (-3), it wasn’t decisive. However, given the Seahawks lack of pressure, it sets up the perfect opportunity to let Bears QB Mitch Trubisky take his time and explore the full depth of new head coach, Matt Nagy’s offense. Covering seems like a reasonable bet for the home team.

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.”

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