Who Wins Patriots at Lions? A.I. Predicts
New England's former defensive coordinator faces his old team.
Most of the league was a bit stunned by the Jacksonville Jaguars Week 2 upset of the Patriots, still that’s no reason to worry as the Patriots head to Detroit this weekend to take on the Lions and former New England defensive coordinator Matt Patricia.
The Lions have struggled to keep opponents off the scoreboard and if anyone will know how to take advantage of Matt Patricia’s defensive schemes, it’s his former boss and mentor, Bill Belichick. It would be shocking for most to see the Patriots drop a second consecutive game against an 0-2 Lions team.
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. About 40 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.
No surprise that the swarm has high confidence in New England. They still have the greatest QB of all time and the best coach too. Home field can mean a lot in any NFL matchup but not when you’re the Detroit Lions and the Patriots are visiting.
The Patriots play the Lions at 8:20 p.m. Eastern Sunday on NBC.
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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