SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Dec 7, 2016) - Once again, a small "human swarm" out-predicted a massive crowd, this time by correctly forecasting that Donald Trump would be TIME Magazine's Person of the Year 2016. This is yet another demonstration that a small number of people, when connected as a real-time closed-loop swarm (i.e. a Swarm Intelligence), provides faster, deeper, more accurate insights than polling thousands upon of disconnected individuals. 

In this case the competition was between UNU, the world's first Artificial Swarm Intelligence from Unanimous A.I., and a massive online poll coordinated and processed by IBM Watson. The swarm, which had only 75 participants connected by A.I. algorithms, forecasted Trump, hands-down, would be the winner. And it made that prediction in only 10 minutes. The IBM Watson Poll, driven by its own A.I. algorithms, took weeks to conduct, required hundreds of thousands of participants, and picked Indian Minister Modi by a wide margin. 

This is not the first time that a small swarm has defeated much larger polls. In a 2016 study performed as a collaboration between researchers at Unanimous A.I. and Oxford University, a crowd of 469 football fans were asked to predict the outcome to a set of twenty official "proposition bets" for the 2016 Super Bowl. This large group was tested against the predictive ability of an Artificial Swarm Intelligence comprised of only 29 football fans, connected online in real-time as a "hive mind". Results revealed that the swarm outperformed 98% of the individual participants, achieving 68% accuracy while the large crowd achieved only 47% accuracy. Even more impressive, had the swarm placed bets on its picks, it would have won a 35% ROI, while the large crowd, would have lost money. 

UNU is a unique merger of software algorithms and real-time human input. Modeled after swarms in nature, UNU enables groups of online users to think together as a "brain of brains" that can express itself as a singular unified entity. The swarm that made the Person of the Year prediction was comprised of 75 randomly selected individuals from around the world, connected online by Swarm Intelligence algorithms.

Swarm Intelligence, the science behind UNU, goes back to the birds and the bees. In fact, it goes to all creatures that amplify their group intelligence by forming flocks, schools, colonies, herds, and swarms. Across countless species, nature show us that social groups -- when working together as a unified dynamic system -- can outperform the majority of individual members when solving problems and making decisions, proving the old adage: many minds are better than one.

About Unanimous A.I. Unanimous A.I. develops Artificial Swarm Intelligence technologies, amplifying the brainpower of human groups to super-human levels. For more information about the company, including details about its UNU platform for consumers, or its Swarm Insight™ portal for enterprise, visit unanimous.ai or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.