Kids’ game sparks app to help win world cups
SMART MOVE: Michael Jordan’s app shows how AI works IT all started when Michael Jordan and his brother played endless rounds of “rock, paper, scissors” as children.
Now 24 and an actuarial science graduate, Jordan has created a humanlike mind that plays “rock, paper, scissors” to show what artificial intelligence is all about.
He has realised that a game of chance is a thrilling psychological process to work out an opponent’s strategy.
Jordan has translated his artificial intelligence into an app that demonstrates AI in a user-friendly way.
AI, he says, is “just a collection of smaller subjects — in this case, pattern recognition and machine learning”.
The app allows players to see the inner workings of the AI brain — including its confidence levels, or how it changes strategy.
Jordan, from Cape Town, believes AI will play a big part in sport and he has also created an app that could build the best cricket team based on AI. “For the World Cup, I took all the South African players’ stats. I then made a mathematical model for the AI to work out the probability of who would go out after how many runs.”
This was done by combining the Proteas’ stats with, for example, the Indian team’s stats.
“From there, I could say: if we include [Hashim] Amla we can improve our chance of winning by 30%, for example.”
For American football, he says, “normal stats just predict who will win”, but he sees a future where teams will be instructed by AI to give them an upper hand in the Super Bowl.
AI will increasingly be used in financial decisions, while also playing a bigger role in security.
“Anticipating terrorist attacks will come to rely more on AI identifying the use of words with a hostile element, so watch this space.”