Microsoft’s artificial intelligence predicted the winners of the World Cup semi-finals. There is a 56% probability that France will win the match between France and Belgium, and England will win the match between Croatia and England with a 62% probability, a Microsoft spokesman told Vedomosti.
Microsoft’s predictions are in line with the bookmaker’s expectations: Betting League, Fonbet and Leon have odds for the victory of Belgium and Croatia higher than those of France and England.
Artificial intelligence Microsoft Bing has already published its predictions before the start of the group stage of the championship. For each of the 48 matches, he predicted the likelihood of a team winning. As a result, he guessed correctly 62.5% of the time (30 wins). At the same time, a draw, according to the Bing algorithm, was never the most likely result of a meeting.
The algorithms analyze a ton of information about football, including official statistics, injury information, searches, social media posts, fan likes and expectations, Microsoft explains.
But the success of the algorithm in predictions at the European Football Championship in 2016 strongly depended on the stage of the competition: in the playoffs, Microsoft artificial intelligence guessed 69.2% of the results (9 out of 13 matches), but in 36 group stage matches it correctly determined the result is only 17 – this is 47.2%. Then Microsoft made a mistake with the most important match. In June, he predicted that Germany would have a 66% chance of beating Spain in the final. In the final held in July, the Portuguese national team beat France 1-0.
In 2016, Microsoft made predictions using the Cortana Intelligence Suite, a cloud-based analytics and machine learning service. It was used for more than just football analytics. Renault Formula 1 used it to create racing cars: instead of testing a physical car, the company tests the characteristics of a virtual one, which is much faster. Another consumer of the Cortana Intelligence Suite was elevator manufacturer ThyssenKrupp, which analyzes information from various systems and collects it from sensors installed in the company’s elevators.
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