collective intelligence

Yahoo | Swarm A.I. Correctly Predicts the Kentucky Derby, Accurately Picking all Four Horses of the Superfecta at 540 to 1 Odds

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - May 9, 2016) - If you've been following the predictions made by UNU, a new "Swarm Intelligence" platform from Unanimous A.I., you might bet on the Kentucky Derby this weekend and won big, really BIG. That's because a day before the race, UNU's picks were published for the first four horses, in order. It's a bet called the Superfecta that paid 540 to 1 odds. And that's exactly how the horses came in. And this is not the first stunning pick UNU has made.

How is this possible? It goes back to the birds and bees. Ants too. And fish. From swarms and flocks, to schools and colonies -- countless species have evolved techniques to amplify their intelligence in closed-loop systems that pool their insights and converge on optimal decisions. Biologists call this "Swarm Intelligence" and it allows groups to amplify their collective IQ beyond the capacity of individuals, proving the old adage -- many minds are better than one. 

Until recently, the human species has been unable to take advantage of this fundamental biological technique, for we didn't evolve the ability to swarm. Enter Unanimous A.I., a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2014 by serial entrepreneur and researcher Dr. Louis Rosenberg. The core question Rosenberg set out to answer was: Can humans swarm, and if so can we amplify our intelligence beyond the ability of individuals? The answer appears to be a resounding yes.

Unanimous spent the last two years building a swarm intelligence platform called UNU that enables groups to get together as online swarms -- combining their thoughts, opinions, and intuitions in real-time to answer questions, make predictions, reach decisions, and even play games as a unified collective intelligence. To quantify how smart these UNU swarms really are, researchers at Unanimous regularly convene swarms and ask them to make predictions on high profile events, testing whether or not many minds are truly better than one.