THE CONTENDERS:

Last week, the New York Times posted their picks for the Oscars.  So did the renowned analysis and forecasting blog FiveThirtyEight.  Both made their picks based on deep industry knowledge and/or historical stats.  Both were overseen by experts at the top of their fields.

Last week, a group of 7 novices also made predictions – not as individuals, but by combining their collective brainpower into a single Collaborative Intelligence.  They did this using the UNU platform from Unanimous A.I.  Each of their picks was generated in under 60 seconds.

So, a group of 7 ordinary people with little experience in predictions, limited knowledge of the movies up for awards, and limited time to devote to the effort, forecast the outcome of the top 15 awards at the Oscars in under 15 minutes of deliberation. Surely they’d get wrecked by the experts…

THE RESULTS:

The New York Times correctly predicted 6 of 11 awards.  (Success rate = 55%)

The 538 Blog correctly predicted 5 of 6 awards. (Success Rate = 83%)

The Collaborative A.I. of novices correctly predicted 11 of 15 awards. (Success Rate = 73%)

And… if you look at the same 6 question that 538 answered, the Collaborative A.I. of seven novices matched 538 exactly, with 5 of 6 correct (Success Rate = 83%)

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE that NOVICES DID SO WELL?

Simply put, there’s deep knowledge inherent in social groups and the technology of Collaborative A.I. is now able to tap into that resource. The process is called Social Swarming and can be seen in the video below.  It shows how a group of novices using the UNU™ platform combined their input in real-time to correctly pick BEST ACTOR in only 28 seconds.  As shown, all of the users attack the question at the exact same time, everyone pushing and pulling in synchrony to explore the decision-space and converge on the most preferred solution.  It’s a real-time negotiation that results in a genuine meeting-of-the-minds…

Want to know more about Swarm Intelligence and Collaborative A.I.?

• For more details on the Oscar Predictions by UNU, see this post.
• For more background on the concept of Collaborative A.I, you might like this post.
• To sign up to be a BETA TESTER of the UNU platform, you can click here…