November 28, 2022, 8:23 AM
November 28, 2022, 8:23 AM
The World Cup in Qatar 2022 is captivating millions of people soccer fans and the first matches of the group stage seem to suggest that results on the pitch are never predictable. However, scientists at the Alan Turing Institute, the artificial intelligence research center operated by the most prestigious universities in the United Kingdom, think otherwise.
This group of experts, made up of Nick Barlow, Jack Roberts and Ryan Chan, has designed an artificial intelligence (AI) thatafter 100,000 simulations, has predicted which country is most likely to win the World Cup.
How does this AI work?
This artificial intelligence, which uses Bayesian statistics to calculate the most probable score of each match, has been trained based on the scores of every international match that has taken place since 1872 and que have been compiled by a user of the Github platform.
The algorithm was designed based on two other previous ones that are used to predict the results of European soccer championships (Alrsenal and Dixon-Coles) but some changes were made: they added data from the championships of other continents and also removed the advantage factor. to play at home, which in this case would only correspond to Qatar.
Likewise, more importance is given to recent matches and those played in previous World Cups, while less importance is given to continental tournaments, qualifying rounds and friendly matches.
“After experimenting with the successo from our model to predict the results of the 2014 and 2018 World Cups, we decided to use all international results from the 2002 World Cup onwards,” they said in a statement.
Who will be the winner of the Qatar 2022 World Cup?
AI from the Alan Turing Institute determined the country most likely to lift the Qatar 2022 cup is Brazil, with a 25% advantage against the remaining 31 nations.
Followed by the South American countrythe others with the highest probability, from highest to lowest, are Belgium, Argentina, France, England, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal and Croatia.
How reliable is the artificial intelligence used?
Although AI, considered as a “simple, understandable and robust model”was trained considering a wide variety of factorsthe group of experts emphasizes that there are variables that have not been included and that could make a difference in the final result.
These are, for example, the weather, the adjustment of footballers to time zones, the penalty shootout or the performance of some players who can stand out individually in the World Cup, as happened with the French Zinedine Zidane in France 98 and the Brazilian Ronaldo in Korea-Japan 2002.
Artificial intelligence is hosted on the Github platform And because it’s open source, it can be freely downloaded or upgraded.
What is the Alan Turing Institute?
The Alan Turing Institute is the UK’s national center for data science and artificial intelligence, based at the British Library. It was created in 2015 by five universities (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and Warwick) and the Physical Sciences and Engineering Research Council.
eight other universities (Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Queen Mary University of London, Birmingham, Exeter, Bristol and Southampton) joined the Institute in 2018.
Who was Alan Turing?
Alan Turing was a British mathematician considered the father of theoretical computing and artificial intelligence. He worked as a cryptographer for World War II and later invented the Automatic Computing Engine, one of the first prototypes of modern computers.
Turing died on June 7, 1954. after ingesting a poison. Years before, he had preferred to undergo chemical castration rather than go to prison just for having declared that he was homosexual. /The Republic
