AI is one of the most trending things in the tech world today. Last month, Google’s AlphaGo AI defeated a Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol. Meanwhile, Microsoft built its Tay AI which just said that it’s smoking weed in front of the police. Microsoft also released a bunch of tools to help developers build their own AI systems but after seeing Tay, they might need a bit more work. Meanwhile, the folks over at WSO2 have been doing something more practical with AI: predicting the US Election.
With the US Presidential Election in full swing, the folks over at WSO2 have built an AI that predicted the results of the election. Its latest prediction confirmed everything that we already knew: Trump could easily win the US Presidential Election.
According to the WSO2 AI named Deep Huge, Donald Trump has the best chance of winning the race to the White House. That’s assuming he picks the former Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, as his Vice President. Deep Huge predicts that Donald Trump has a 52.3% chance of winning the White House by himself. But if he chooses Arnold Schwarzenegger as his Vice President then he has a 99.4% chance of beating all other candidates.
So how did Deep Huge come to this prediction? It all started by collecting poll data from the Associated Press, historical records, earlier elections, news articles, secret NSA surveys and Twitter. This data is then fed into WSO2 Machine Learner, which creates a prediction model. This model is used to calculate the probability of each candidate winning and then runs their chances against a list of potential vice president candidates.
Initially, Deep Huge couldn’t give any useful predictions as it didn’t have enough data. As time passed, candidates dropped out, campaign tactics were solidified, and the predictions became clearer. According to WSO2, Deep Huge has successfully modeled the key pitfalls such as shifts of public opinion and the problems with running your own email server.
To train itself, Deep Huge has to date run 11,302 simulations on available prediction data from the previous years, comparing it against the actual results. But no matter how much data it collected and the simulations it ran, every prediction showed that the choice of Vice President was critical. This is because a Vice President as the second most powerful player brings their own voter base.
While Arnold Schwarzenegger would help solidify Donald Trump’s position in California, the two have similar qualities that would complement each other. As the WSO2 team highlights, both Arnold and Trump want to close the Mexican border and have a track record of making politically incorrect statements. By having a partner that compliments him, Deep Huge predicts that Donald Trump can easily win the US Presidential Race.
The WSO2 team has stated that by building Deep Huge they gained valuable insight into how elections work. They hope that in the near future, Deep Huge can become the one bot that can predict all elections. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has heard this prediction made an announcement reversing his stance on outsourcing, and decided to have his campaign planning computed by WSO2 Machine Learner running in Sri Lanka.
Oh and by the way, April Fools 🙂
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