Google Says Its AI Will Predict the Result of Final Four NCAA 2018 Games at Half-Time

The 2018 NCAA Tournament’s Final Four round is set to kick off tomorrow, but among the eager fans who’ll be there on the sidelines to cheer their favorite team, a bunch of techies will be preparing to do something truly astonishing – predicting the final outcome before the second half even begins.

Google has announced that its group of technicians, data scientists, and basketball enthusiasts will attend the Final Four games, but instead of cheering for either team, the ‘Wolfpack’ will utilize Google’s AI-powered analytics tool to predict the game’s final outcome and also create ads in just 9 minutes using a cutting-edge simulation tool.

This weekend, we’ll attempt to do exactly that during the Final Four in San Antonio—and we’ll be sharing our predictions in real-time TV ads you can see during halftime. Here’s how it’ll work.

Google partnered with NCAA last year to create a digital database of over 80+ years of game data from 90 championship leagues on the Google Cloud Platform, that would later be studied and analyzed by tools like BigQuery, Cloud Spanner, Datalab, Cloud Machine Learning and Cloud Dataflow. The goal was to create a predictive analytics platform that could help in a better analysis of team and player performances, improve the accuracy of forecasts and create analysis workflows.

At the Final Four games, Google’s team and the algorithms will examine the data from first half and run a predictive analytics tool to generate the final outcome. This data will be used by another on the ground to create an ad right from the court. The ad, predicting the final outcome, will be created using a real-time rendering system built by Cloneless and Eleven Inc., both of which are based on Google’s cloud platform.

The TV ad will be broadcasted by TBS, making it the first time that a game’s final result has been predicted analytically and presented in the form of an advert before even the second half begins. It would be an impressive achievement for Google, but the severity of outrage from fans of the losing team (as per the prediction) is something Google surely can’t predict. We wish them all the best, though!