Skip to main content

Swarm AI correctly predicted the outcome of Super Bowl LI, right down to the final score

tom brady facebook watch docu series vs time new england
Keith Allison/Flickr
The New England Patriots’ win over the Atlanta Falcons was nothing short of amazing. The Pats rallied back from a 25-point deficit to tie the game in the final minutes of regulation and secured the win with a decisive touchdown drive in overtime. You may still be reeling from the comeback, but here’s something else that will blow your mind: Even before the first ball was snapped, an artificial intelligence platform accurately predicted the outcome of the game, right down to the 34-28 win by the Patriots.

Created by Unanimous, Swarm AI is a prediction engine that combines swarming algorithms with human input. The company’s AI software allows real, live human users to gather in artificial swarms, The software monitored the conversations in these swarms and collected group intelligence data that is used to make predictions. The company has a string of success accurately predicting the top four winning horses in a recent Kentucky Derby, the last two Stanley Cup winners, and nine out of 10 NFL playoff games.

Being able to predict the final score of the Super Bowl is not an easy task, though. Of the 1,641 Super Bowl final score predictions published by Scripps Howard over the past 19 years, only two have been correct regarding Super Bowl final score predictions. For the Super Bowl, Unanimous took on this challenge by creating wars with 40 football fans and connected them online. The platform then used the swarm’s group intelligence to make its own predictions about how many points each team would score.

So when the Patriots ended up winning the Super Bowl with the predicted 34-28 score, the folks at Unanimous (and everywhere else) were blown away by this uncanny prediction. Now that the Super Bowl is out of the way, Unanimous is eyeing the NHL’s Stanley Cup and the NCAA March Madness tournament.

Editors' Recommendations

Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more