UNU GOES GAGA FOR LA LA LAND
With the arrival of the 89th Academy Awards, Unanimous A.I. once again challenged UNU, its powerful Swarm A.I. technology to predict the winners in all major categories. If you are unfamiliar with Artificial Swarm Intelligence (i.e. Swarm A.I.), it combines real-time insights from real people, distributed all around the world, using artificial intelligence algorithms that are modeled after swarms in nature. Each individual participant becomes a brainy and opinionated “human processor” within the emergent Swarm A.I. system, providing human knowledge, wisdom, and intuitions that are combined with the input from others to achieve optimized predictions, decisions, and forecasts.
UNU has proven to make stunningly accurate predictions, especially when it comes to big events like the Oscars. In fact, UNU was challenged by Newsweek in 2015 and 2016 to predict the Oscars by forming a real-time human swarm of 50 average movie fans linked by A.I. algorithms. Both years, the A.I.-powered swarm of regular fans out-predicted the vast majority of professional movie critics, even beating the LA times, 538, and the New York Times. Last month, swarms of casual football fans managed to nail the exact final score of the Super Bowl. And, just two weekends ago, a group of music fans beat industry experts again in picking the winners of the 2017 Grammy Awards.
This week, the researchers at Unanimous A.I. fielded multiple swarms of approximately 50 movie fans to predict the outcome of Sunday’s Academy Awards. The swarms showed remarkable consistency, and revealed agreement with industry buzz, but also a few fascinating divergences from the conventional wisdom. Let’s start with the big story here, Best Picture. Shown below is the real-time Swarm A.I. system converging upon a confident prediction:
The above prediction, revealed very high conviction in the outcome, which is not unexpected as La La Land is a heavy favorite based on all other industry awards. The same is true for Best Director, as shown below:
By the swarm’s reckoning, it will be a grave miscarriage of Oscar justice if La La Land and writer/director Damien Chazelle don’t rake in a whole lot of hardware on Sunday. The Swarm A.I. also loves La La Land’s chances to win Oscars for Cinematography and Production Design. And the swarm also believes that La La Land star Emma Stone will win Best Actress over perennial Oscar shark Meryl Streep and oft-nominated Natalie Portman.
One of the most intriguing battles of Sunday Night may be the fight over Best Foreign Film. Here you can see the swarm splitting fairly evenly at first, with lots of support to both the Iranian film, The Salesman, and German nominee Toni Erdmann. While industry insiders and all the sports books are still favoring Toni Erdmann, there’s speculation that recent political events involving the travel ban executive order may swing sentiment to the underdog here. The Swarm A.I. seems to support that line of thinking, and if the Academy agrees it will be a mild upset on Sunday night.
All in all, the Swarm A.I. picked winners in the top 16 major categories. You can see from the chart below how your favorites fared against the power of Swarm A.I. at a glance. The results are ranked by the swarm’s confidence in each prediction, using a theoretical bet of $100 as an expression of maximum conviction. Clicking the chart will take you to a table with links to replays of all the the swarm’s Oscar predictions.
Unanimous A.I. regularly challenges its swarms to predict and give insight on the biggest events of the day. Drop us a note below and we’ll keep you in the loop.
