'Swarm Intelligence' wins $11,000 after correctly predicting the Kentucky Derby's first 4 finishers
Picking one horse to win a race is hard enough, but four horses and their exact placements in the grand Kentucky Derby? It's practically impossible.
But that's exactly what just happened thanks to a crowdsourced intelligence called Swarm Intelligence. The bet is called the superfecta, and there's a 1 in 540 chance of winning it -- bettors have to pick out the horses that'll place first, second, third and fourth in the Derby.
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TechRepublic reporter Hope Reese challenged Unanimous A.I., a company that creates Swarm artificial intelligence technologies that allow groups to combine their thoughts and feelings in real-time to "answer questions, make decisions, or just have fun," to pick out winners. Unanimous' Swarm Intelligence is called UNU and it has correctly predicted winners for the Super Bowl, Oscars, NCAA and more in the past.
After David Baltaxe, the company's chief information officer, accepted the challenge, the company put out an online ad seeking volunteers to be part of its "swarm." This swarm was then tasked with narrowing the horses down from 20 to four by answering certain questions, and ultimately ordering them in "Win, Place, Show and Fourth."
In total, the UNU swarm spent about 20 minutes working out their picks.
Once the Kentucky Derby horse positions were announced, the swarm regrouped and decided to make a single change.
In total, the UNU swarm spent about 20 minutes working out their picks for the Superfecta bet.
Reese put down $1 based on UNU's picks and after winning the bet was $540 richer. Unanimous also made a $20 bet and won $10,800 off it.
Compared to a traditional survey or voting system, the same swarm group would only have predicted one correct horse, according to Unanimous.
It's all mighty impressive, to say the least. We wouldn't be surprised at all if Unanimous sees a spike in people interested in being a part of its UNU Beta program.
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Raymond Wong is Mashable's Senior Tech Correspondent. He reviews gadgets and tech toys and analyzes the tech industry. Raymond's also a bit of a camera geek, gamer, and fine chocolate lover. Before arriving at Mashable, he was the Deputy Editor of NBC Universal's tech publication DVICE. His writing has appeared on G4TV, BGR, Yahoo and Ubergizmo, to name a few. You can follow Raymond on Twitter @raywongy or Instagram @sourlemons.
