Earlier this summer, a swarm made up of fans of The Voice made some uncannily accurate predictions. Meeting weekly, this swarm called out multiple contestant eliminations and predicted ultimate winner Brynn Cartelli almost from the outset. With the summer dance talent show So You Think You Can Dance down to its final 10 dancers, Unanimous convened a swarm of fans of that show to again predict winners and losers both.

While the subject matter – singing and dancing talent shows – may not have the gravitas of Unanimous swarms on public policy, they nonetheless present a fascinating circumstance to apply swarm intelligence to. In the case of both reality contests, the winners are decided by the voting of viewers at home. That means that the swarm is ultimately trying to predict preference of large audience that may number in the hundreds of thousands with a small group of a few dozen. Here’s how the swarm earlier today ranks the dancers on likelihood of winning the competition.

When ranking the list, the swarm moved with a reasonable degree of confidence in ranking each individual participant from ten through seven, until it had to rank the top three. At that point, the group had a more difficult time in placing Magdalena Fialek third in the final set of dancers.

If choosing the third most likely to win was difficult, picking the most likely winner among a final two of ballroom stylist Cole Mills and hip hop dancer Slavik Pustovoytov was an even greater challenge.

Interestingly, the puck moves towards Cole’s side of the hex first, but then we see that the participants believing in him show less conviction than those pulling for Slavik, and by the narrowest, most coinflip-like decisions, the swarm chose the Ukrainian-born performer from Oklahoma. It will be interesting to see how this prediction evolves over the coming weeks, as the swarm sees these two dance in more high pressure situations.

And though it’s certainly fun to celebrate the winners, it wouldn’t be a reality show talent competition if someone wasn’t sent home each week. Tonight, with the men and women paired together for duets, one set of dancers will be sent home. Although the swarm predicted Chelsea and Evan to be this week’s unfortunate dancers to be eliminated only “by a little”, the number of magnets pulling that way on the hex shows what might be a stronger underlying confidence that their time is indeed up tonight.

Unanimous will be fielding swarms throughout 2018 to track the sentiment of the American public and to identify the trends and behaviors that are shaping our future.  If you would like to stay informed of our research, sign up below.

Want to learn more about our Swarm AI technology? Check out our TED talk below…