Who Will Win Chargers vs. Patriots? Preview and Winner for Rivers vs. Brady
It was a difficult prediction to make for the swarm.
Can Old Man Rivers finally break through and beat the hated Patriots? Human meme Philip Rivers leads the Chargers into Foxborough this afternoon to take on the Patriots with a shot at redemption (and another step towards securing an ever-elusive Super Bowl ring).
Rivers did just enough to power the Bolts past the Ravens in last week’s wildcard game, completing 22 of 32 passes for 160 yards. The degree of difficulty ramps up this afternoon, as the bogeyman in New England awaits once again. Infamously, Rivers has never beaten the Patriots, losing all seven games against New England in his career to date, including two in the playoffs. Yikes. Will the eighth time be the charm?
In the other corner, New England “endured” a “disappointing” season, going “only” 11-5 and leading some to wonder whether the Patriots’ dynasty was coming to a close. Oh no, you don’t, purveyors of false hope. Despite their “down” year, the Patriots still managed to secure a top-two seed in the AFC and a first-round bye.
We fully expect New England head coach Bill Belichick to have spent his week off cooking up a game plan full of booby traps and snares for the unwitting Chargers, like Jigsaw in the Saw franchise or McCauley Caulkin in Home Alone. That’s just too much time for the Patriots to prepare. Patriots 27, Chargers 24 is my prediction, but how does a hive-mind of NFL experts predict this game ending up?
To predict the result of this 2018 NFL post-season match-up, Unanimous A.I. used what’s known as swarm intelligence. A “swarm” of 31 NFL enthusiasts worked together as a hive mind to make their prediction, and as you can see in the animation below, each participant controlled a golden magnet and used it to drag the puck toward the result they thought was the most likely outcome. This is where it gets interesting: As a user sees the puck move toward a particular decision, it triggers a psychological response. They might readjust their thinking as the group builds toward a consensus. It’s an artificial intelligence, produced by human brains, working together as a swarm.
As the swarm replay above shows, this was a difficult prediction to make. A hive-mind of 31 NFL experts was almost evenly split on a prediction for the winner, but has chosen the Chargers to win on the road against New England on Sunday.
The Chargers play at the Patriots at 1:05 p.m. Eastern Sunday on CBS.
Here’s how Unanimous A.I. has predicted previous NFL games this season.
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:
