The National Hockey League playoffs are notorious for the large number of teams that qualify and the long slog of the tournament.  The victor must win 16 games over four best-of-seven series.  While favorites are easily identified, a team’s strong performance during the regular season is no guarantee they’ll hoist Lord Stanley’s Cup.  As a consequence, picking the winner early in the playoffs is not an easy task for any individual, novice or expert.  Of course, we didn’t ask an individual…

We asked a swarm. More specifically, we asked a group of nine college students who with the aid of the UNU platform, predicted the winner by working together as unified swarm intelligence.  The process took less than 60 seconds.

The prediction was made on April 20, 2015 – before any of the 16 teams had been eliminated. The participants first narrowed the choices by selecting their five preferred contenders – three from the Western Conference and two from the Eastern Conference. They then picked a winner from among them. A replay of the selection is shown below:

The swarm predicted the Chicago Blackhawks will win the Stanley Cup. On the day the prediction was made, Vegas bookmakers gave Chicago 7/1 odds of making it all the way. Now almost four weeks later, the Blackhawks are still going strong, having defeated Nashville in round one and Minnesota in round two.  Of course, they still need to get past Anaheim for a shot at the Cup, but so far the prediction is holding up. In fact, the Vegas odds have tightened considerably to 9/4.  Which of course leaves us wondering…

Will a group of nine novices end up getting it right? We can’t wait to find out.  And we hope you will come back and find out with us how insightful the swarm really was.

If you are interested in participating in future predictions, sign up here.