[no_protocol]

Nothing about this seems to add up.

They claim they made the prediction in early July, but link to a newspaper article dated 4 August that indicates the predictions were made just one day earlier.

They picked the team with the best record all season long to win the championship. They got one of the division winners wrong.

Just publishing the current favorites from MLB.com's probability page [0] as of 3 August would have also gotten 9 of 10 postseason teams correct, including going 6/6 on division winners. So the 'knowledge' of fans voting actually did worse than a monte carlo simulation.

I'm not impressed.

There's no way this should be considered predicting the "full baseball post-season," and I am not seeing any evidence that it happened in July. Wish they'd have shared it.

[0] http://mlb.com/mlb/standings/probability.jsp?ymd=20161002

[Cortexia]

They tend to publish academic papers about the predictions. This one is obviously too recent to review, but here is an academic paper (IEEE) about their SUPERBOWL PREDICTIONS, complete with formal statistics:

http://unu.ai/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Crowds-Vs-Swarms-SH...

[zach]

By "They tend to publish academic papers" you mean you used an "academic paper" template and uploaded it to your website.

[bluetwo]

According to the article:

"A group of Boston Globe readers accurately predicted nine of baseball’s 10 playoff teams after participating in a 30-minute online experiment using Unanimous A.I.’s Swarm Intelligence on Aug. 3."

So they don't credit the AI as much as the readers. I agree it is all fishy. Someone trying to pump up the value of their company.

[Cortexia]

Actually, that's how a Swarm Intelligence works - it's a real-time system that connects LIVE PEOPLE using swarming algorithms.

So, the Boston Globe provided the people and provided the questions... they formed a Swarm Intelligence, and made the predictions.

The Boston Globe did this to see if the swarm intelligence could make strong picks. It did.

[bluetwo]

I get it, but there is a little bit of dishonesty in saying it was the system that did the work. It was the system that automated discovery of a solution, but it was the people that did the work.

As I pointed out in a different post, this is an update of the established technique of delta polling. Delta polling is useful, and an automated way of doing it can help if find even more uses for a lower cost. I see the value here. But, it isn't AI, and the system isn't doing the assessment. It is not intelligence.

[fleitz]

There's also the issue of the full suite of predictions, if these were the only predictions made then it's impressive, but if they made lots of predictions then some of their predictions coming true may be no better than chance.

[Cortexia]

They also predicted which managers would win the MVP awards, and which players would win the CY YOUNG awards but those don't get announced for 2 weeks.

[hvs]

Managers don't win MVP awards.

[FonzieBear]

Well, The Boston Globe only made the one set of predictions.