NFL Week 5 Predictions: A.I. Predicts Jaguars vs. Chiefs Winner
Fortunately for Jacksonville, the Chiefs’ defense is as bad as their offense is good.
The NFL’s No. 1 offense faces the No. 1 defense when the Jaguars square off against the Chiefs this Sunday. Expect clichés. Irresistible force, meet immovable object.
Precocious Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes remains on the warpath this season, having led the Chiefs to a gutsy, blue-collar win during Monday Night Football last week. At one point during the Chiefs’ 27-23 victory, the Broncos’ pass rush forced the right-handed Mahomes to abandon the pocket, where he calmly transferred the ball to his off hand and threw for a first down left-handed (no, seriously). Dude is out here dual-wielding like the NFL is an advance copy of Red Dead Redemption II.
Mahomes is cold-blooded. Colder than a yeti eating frozen spaghetti. Colder than the reviews Venom is getting. “Catwoman-level bad”?! Damn. Colder than your ex-girlfriend when you go to Vegas with your boys and return to discover that she has announced your breakup by moving all of her stuff out during your absence, leaving only three hooks on the wall. Ice cold.
And yet, while it seems odd to say that the Broncos “held” the Mahomies to “only” 27 points, they showed that it’s possible to contain Kansas City’s offense and limit the damage, at least in stretches. Enter Jacksonville, which features the league’s No. 1 defense through the first month of the season. Fortunately for Jacksonville, the Chiefs’ defense is as bad as their offense is good. This jovial band of air-huggers should allow for plenty of opportunities for Blake “the Snake” Bortles (you heard it here first) and company to score just enough points to squeak by in a close one.
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.
The A.I. Swarm likes the Chiefs in this one. Because we like the Jaguars, let this serve as a warning to all against the perils of groupthink. Defense wins championships. Jaguars 28, Chiefs 27.
The Jaguars play at the Chiefs at 1 p.m. 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.”
