How an A.I. turned R300 into R164,000 in 20 minutes

An artificial intelligence program has made $10,822 (R163,956) at this year’s Kentucky derby.

The AI bet $20 (R302) on the “Superfecta” – where bettors are asked not only to pick the winner, but the second, third, and fourth horses to finish the Derby. This is an almost impossible task, with every expert at Churchill Downs and Bing Predicts picking only heavily favored Nyquist to win the race, but missing the other 3 picks entirely.

The bet occured after Hope Reese, a reporter for Tech Republic, challenged Unanimous AI and the crowd-driven UNU system to accurately predict the bets.

UNU is a “swarm-based” program – that means it takes the concentrated guesses of numerous individuals in order to formulate its own answer. On the day it only took twenty minutes for UNU to reach an answer from the completely anonymous individuals it collected data from.

Why do swarms outperform polls, surveys, and markets?

Millions of years of evolution should give us a clue.

The birds and the bees don’t vote, or take surveys, or use sequential prediction markets. They form real-time dynamic systems that explore a decision space together, in synchrony, and converge on optimal solutions in unison. Now humans can too…

As artificial intelligence grows more powerful in coming years, it will be interesting to see the effect it will have on the gambling industry as the odds continuously tip in the favour of advanced software.