NFL Week 5 Predictions: A.I. Predicts Giants vs. Panthers Winner
The Giants really should be better than this.
The Giants really should be better than this. Then again, after a 3-13 season last year, maybe not.
The Giants have the fourth-worst rushing defense in the NFL, having conceded more than 500 yards on the ground thus far this season. Meanwhile, the Panthers have the League’s seventh-best rushing offense. Giants linebacker Olivier Vernon and defensive tackle Damon “Snacks” Harrison (a favorite of mine, for obvious reasons) are listed as Questionable for this game. Even if one or both play(s) against Carolina, all signs point towards the Giants struggling to decaffeinate the versatile Christian “Wild Caff” McCaffrey and the rest of the Panthers’ rushing attack.
The Giants have already slipped to 1-3, have sunk back to the bottom of the NFC East, and risk falling into total irrelevance with another loss. By contrast, the Panthers are 2-1 and need a win to keep pace with the white-hot Saints in the NFC South. Star Giants receiver Odell Beckham, Jr. has racked up the yards this season, but has yet to find the end zone. He seems due for a big game, but will that tip the scales in New York’s favor? Magic 8 Ball says… probably not. The beatings will continue until morale improves. Panthers 27, Giants 20.
To predict the result of this Week 5 match-up, Unanimous A.I. used what’s known as swarm intelligence to forecast the week’s slate. About 30 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. It’s an artificial intelligence produced by human brains working together as a swarm.
As you can see the Panthers are not only favored to win, but the swarm has low confidence that Carolina will also beat the Vegas spread of 7 points.
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.”
