Who Wins Giants at Cowboys? A.I. Predicts

The New York Giants have more offensive Weapons then they’ve had in years. Standout rookie Saquon Barkley lived up to the hype with a solid performance against on the best defenses in football in the Jacksonville Jaguars. Veteran star Odell Beckham Jr. is back and healthy. The question for the Giants is whether veteran QB Eli Manning can play to the level to take advantage of his offensive weapons.

The Cowboys are entering Week 2 with problems that don’t look to be getting better anytime soon. The Boys offensive line failed to protect shaky Dak Prescott and the lack of creative play calling from head coach Jason Garrett made for a slow start to end in a painful finish. Week 2, on paper, should go to the Giants who played much better against a much better team than the Cowboys faced in Week 1.

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.

Above: The Swarm seems to agree that the Giants should have the edge in this matchup, especially against the spread (-3). The confidence is low that the G-Men will be able to cover, but the Cowboys’ offensive line was just too shaky and predictable to pick the Cowboys with any level of confidence. Divisional games can be a bit unpredictable, but you’d be smart to put your faith in the Giants.

Below: When facing the question of who will win straight-up, the swarm seemed to think it would be Dallas, but as you the GIF shows, the only think it was confident about was how not-confident it was in the 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.”

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