The next time you decide to put money on a race then perhaps it would be a good idea to use artificial intelligence.
Unanimous – an artificial intelligence company – has designed a software platform that has so far predicted several winning results correctly from the Oscars to political candidate performances. But most recently it managed to predict the winner of the latest Kentucky Derby collecting $11,000 in the process.
According to TechRepublic, the system called UNU, uses the same concept as a swarm of bees. The idea is that individual insights will provide a group with optimal decisions allowing for a greater and more accurate prediction of an outcome.
In the case of the Kentucky Derby, Unanimous took twenty participants who used the software to narrow down their choices of race horse winners to four. They then used UNU to predict the order in which the horses would come in the race which turned out to be 100 percent accurate: Nyquist, Exaggerator, Gun Runner and Mohaymen.
“The UNU swarm intelligence seemed to strongly favor Nyquist for the win, maintaining conviction in that pick even after an unfavorable post position was announced,” states Louis Rosenberg, CEO of Unanimous A.I. “Of course it’s horse racing, so there’s no such thing as a sure thing.”
Experts are impressed but aren’t too sure that this software is the best predictor. Roman Yampolskiy, director of the Cybersecurity lab at the University of Louisville believes that the system is questionable when it comes to betting.
“If swarm AI worked as advertised, it would be easy to monetize it via prediction markets. Huge amounts of money are waged on Derby outcome, as we don’t see such betting happening it is a strong testament to the system’s questionable performance, even in the eyes of its designers.”
However, artificial intelligence is fast becoming more prominent in today’s technological world and could revolutionize anything from smartphones to cars in the future.