Last month, Unanimous AI used its revolutionary new Conversational Swarm Intelligence platform, Thinkscape™, to predict which March Madness NCAA Tournament games presented the strongest possibilities for an upset. Unanimous then used these first round upset picks as it populated an entire bracket using its proprietary Swarm AI® technology.
With all of the games now completed (post updated), we can confirm that by deliberating conversationally in Thinkscape, this group of 42 randomly selected sports fans (who collectively should have averaged in the 50th percentile) produced a bracket that performed in the top 11% nationally in the ESPN prediction contest.
The way this experiment worked, we invited 42 sports fans from Amazon Mechanical Turk to participate, paying each person a few dollars for their time. They logged into Thinkscape and we tasked them with deliberating conversationally to debate and converge on which games were most likely could produce big upsets in each of the regional brackets.
In the West Bracket, the group picked 12th-seeded Grand Canyon to upset 5th-seeded Saint Mary’s. In the South, they took another 12 seed, this time selecting James Madison to surprise 5th-seeded Wisconsin. In the Midwest Region, these hoops fans tapped 13th-seeded Samford to pull a huge upset on an injury-plagued 4th seed, Kansas. Finally, the group selected 12th-seeded UAB to knock off 5th-seeded San Diego State, a returning 2023 Tournament finalist.
Of those four upset forecasts, two of the picks (Grand Canyon and James Madison) resulted in wins. But with a task to call out the high potential for upsets, the group’s ability to also identify Samford (who lost by four points with the help of a controversial foul call with 20 seconds remaining) and UAB (who were shooting free throws to tie the game with less than a minute left) as likely spoilers in very close games is deserving of note.
Researchers at Unanimous AI took the Thinkscape upset predictions and brought together another group of college basketball fans (from Amazon Mechanical Turk) to finished a complete March Madness bracket. As you can see from the image above, that bracket is currently in the top 89% of the over twenty millions of brackets submitted in ESPN’s annual challenge.
