An AI Has Simulated 100,000 World Cups And Discovered Who's Going to Win This Year

With the biggest event in the soccer calendar now underway, fans are speculating on which team might emerge victorious from the 2018 World Cup in Russia – and an artificial intelligence model based on 100,000 simulations has made its prediction too. Using a database of statistics from previous tournaments, and three different AI methods to crunch the numbers, the international team of researchers behind the work thinks Spain is going to emerge victorious... but it's going to be close. At the moment the bookmakers are backing Germany to be World Cup winners, but the AI analysed both the strength of the teams and their route to the final. While Germany would beat Spain in a one-off game, the models showed, the German team is likely to face more difficult opponents through the course of the competition. "By analysing the winning probabilities conditional on reaching the single stages of the tournament, it turns out that the fact that overall Spain is slightly favoured over Germany is mainly due to the fact that Germany has a comparatively high chance to drop out in the round of 16," write the researchers.