Artificial Intelligence Machine Predicts 2018 World Cup Winner

An artificial intelligence machine ran 100,000 simulations of the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which is hosted in Russia, and concluded that the winner of the international sporting event will be Spain. If Spain is not to prevail, the machine sequentially picked Germany, Brazil, France, Belgium, or Argentina to win. The calculations, which were developed by a group of researchers in Germany and Belgium, used a number of factors to determine the winner. They included, but weren't limited to, FIFA rankings, population, gross domestic product (GDP), the number of players who play together on a single club, average age of a club's players, and how many Champions League finals each has won. The team, according to The Next Web, proceeded to pair that data with betting odds from the larger bookmakers and ran the simulation 100,000 times to try and pick the victorious team(s). However, the researchers told Motherboard that given "the myriad of possible constellations this exact tournament course is still extremely unlikely."