Who Wins Chargers at Rams? A.I. Predicts

So how good are the LA Rams? Picked by many to be Super Bowl favorites in the NFC, this week will be the first true test of the team’s potential. The Rams boast a 2-0 record, but with wins over the hapless Raiders and the hopeless Cardinals, there’s no real reason to brag about their league-leading 6.5 points allowed per game.

The Chargers are coming in with a 1-1 record but getting beat in Week 1 by a Kansas City Chiefs assault is nothing to feel bad about. True, the Chargers gave up 20 points to the Buffalo Bills but it was garbage time points (such garbage that Bills CB Vontae Davis QUIT AT HALFTIME. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GAME HE PUT ON STREET CLOTHES AND WALKED OUT. Well done, Buffalo).

To predict the result of this Week 3 match-up, Unanimous A.I. used what’s known as swarm intelligence to forecast the week’s slate. Thirty-three NFL enthusiasts 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 decision, it triggered a psychological response. They readjusted their decision-making, building toward the consensus you see below.

Despite the positive signs the Chargers have shown, the swarm feels pretty good that the Rams will win and even cover the -7 they are giving Philip Rivers and company. There’s no doubt the Rams are the better team on paper and their defense should give the Chargers trouble all day.

The Chargers play the Rams at 4:05 p.m. Eastern Sunday on CBS.

Unanimous A.I. has made some scarily accurate predictions in the past using swarm intelligence, as our this 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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