Is It Necessary to Compete in a Competition Where AI Can Predict the Outcome?

With AI being so crazy, is it still possible for people to play basketball properly?

NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) is a sports association formed by American colleges and universities. It organizes various sports leagues, among which the most popular are the basketball league in the first half of the year and the football league in the second half of the year. The stage of the NCAA men's basketball championship has always been the cradle of NBA stars. Ray Allen, Uncle Mu, Melo Anthony, Durant, etc. were all star players of the NCAA in those days.

During this year's NCAA tournament season, Google will be working with the NCAA as a partner to do something big.

Google will be at halftime of the NCAA game.AI is used to analyze the first half game data and the team's historical data to predict the outcome of the game before the second half begins.So if you want to bet on football and want to place a bet on the outcome of the game in the second half, then Google's AI predictions may be able to help you.

Is this technology only used for football betting? Of course not.

Courtney Blacker of the Google Cloud team that led the project said, “We assembled a team of technical people, data scientists, and basketball enthusiasts who built data processing workflows primarily using Google Cloud technologies such as BigQuery and Cloud Datalab.”By predicting the results of the second half based on the team's performance in the first half and finding the right advertisers, Google and its creative team will instantly create more attractive ads to display the results.

Halftime advertisements at sporting events are of great significance to advertisers in the United States. Remember the annual Super Bowl finals night, known as the "American Spring Festival Gala"? Not only are brand sponsors most willing to spend money, but many classic advertisements are also born there.

China has always been a major sports and sports lottery country, so whether it is the intelligent prediction products of large Internet companies or the XX index and XX prediction of start-up companies, they all emphasize that they have powerful algorithms and event databases that combine the opinions of senior experts.

Someone once found the prediction data of Wang Nan, a famous football commentator, and compared it with the prediction results of artificial intelligence. Wang Nan is a football reporter for CCTV Sports Channel and the editor-in-chief of "Football Night". He recently predicted 6 out of 10 games, which is a very high hit rate in the field of expert prediction. However, for the same 10 games, there were prediction products that hit 7 games, with a hit rate directly higher than 10 %.

But whether it is Google's AI or various products, if they can really accurately predict the outcome of a game and continue to cooperate for a long time, no matter what the result is, it will be a tragedy in sports history.

After all, the appeal of competitive sports lies in the excitement brought by the unknown results and the sportsmanship of the athletes to break through. Until the last moment, you never know what the result will be, and when this uncertainty becomes predictable, competitive sports always lose some viewing value.

The penetration of AI into our daily lives is unstoppable. Apart from sports events, AI is curious about everything and wants to make predictions.

• MogIA has accurately predicted the results of the last three US presidential elections

Last year, as the US presidential election entered the final sprint of fierce competition, MogIA predicted that Republican candidate Trump would defeat Democratic candidate Hillary and win the final presidential throne.

Although Trump was lagging behind Hillary in the polls at the time, MogIA predicted that Trump's chances of winning were even 25% higher than Obama's in 2008.

Two years ago, artificial intelligence company Unanimous AI predicted six major awards including Best Actor based on big data. Three of them were correct, with an accuracy rate of 50 %, and even predicted that Leo DiCaprio, who had been a runner-up for 22 years, would win the Best Actor award.

• Alibaba's Xiao Ai successfully predicted the champion of "I Am a Singer"

In 2016, Alibaba's Xiao Ai successfully predicted who would win the championship of "I Am a Singer".Xiao Ai's prediction results reflect the scores of 500 public judges on site.Although Xiao Ai was not favored by netizens, she performed brilliantly, winning three rounds of predictions in a row, and successfully predicted Coco Lee as the champion in the final round.

AI is so powerful, is there any point for humans to work hard to achieve predicted results?

Of course, humans will continue to provide data sets for AI. (Wrong)

We often discuss the status and role of AI in our future lives. We are full of expectations for the technology transformed by AI, but we are also afraid that AI will backfire on humans.But you have to know that although humans and our ancestors have existed on Earth for nearly ten thousand years, the most important scientific discoveries and technological innovations have only been discovered in the past hundred years. It is inevitable to worry about the rapid pace of technological development.

As long as we are willing to keep exploring and break through the ceiling of cognition, we believe that AI is just a tool, and talents are the most important yardstick and the main body of implementing technology, rather than just enjoying the fruits brought by technology.In fact, in "Interstellar", Christopher Nolan set the end of the earth and the five-dimensional wormhole on a bookshelf, which shows his thoughts and feelings about the fate of mankind.

When it comes to AI, don’t go gentle into that good night.