Premier League predictions - how accurate were BBC Sport pundits? Last summer, 33 BBC TV and radio pundits made their predictions for the Premier League season, picking their champions and their top four. Twenty-one of them thought Liverpool would win it, and none of them got more than two clubs right. Although six pundits correctly picked Arsenal as champions, and everyone had the Gunners and Manchester City in their top four, Matthew Upson was the only one to have the top two in the order they actually finished. Martin Keown, Thomas Hitzlsperger, Sue Smith, Leon Osman and Jermaine Beckford were the other pundits who also backed Mikel Arteta's side.

Forget the scrap for survival between Tottenham and West Ham, the real battle on the final day of the Premier League season is humans versus machines. The outcome of the BBC predictions title race has gone to the wire, and BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton is the only one who can stop AI - Microsoft chatbot Copilot - from taking the glory. With one round of fixtures to go, they are level on outright wins - which is the decisive metric. Sutton is in second place because he has managed fewer tied victories, so he needs another outright win on Sunday to finish top of the table. The BBC readers and the guests have put up a pretty pathetic fight, said Sutton. It is just down to me now.

The 145th FA Cup final takes place at Wembley on Saturday but will it be Manchester City or Chris Sutton's old club Chelsea who get their hands on the famous old trophy? Chelsea have not beaten City in any of their past 13 meetings but their last success against Pep Guardiola's side came on another huge occasion, the 2021 Champions League final. I was at that game and Pep did not get the better of Thomas Tuchel, said BBC Sport football expert Sutton. He is not going to be schooled by Calum McFarlane though. As well as the FA Cup, Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For all of this weekend's games, he takes on two Manchester City fans - frontman and guitarist Tom Ogden and drummer Joe Donovan from indie band Blossoms - and a Chelsea supporter - rapper Songer. Blossoms' new single, Joke About Divorce, is out. It is their first new material since their 2024 UK number one album, Gary.

Image caption, Will Pep Guardiola or Mikel Arteta be lifting the Premier League trophy next month? With five games to go, Manchester City and Arsenal are only separated on goals scored at the top of the Premier League table. It's a new league now, says Gunners boss Mikel Arteta, whose side had been top of the table for 209 days until Wednesday. Manchester City's 2-1 win over Arsenal on Sunday boosted their hopes - and a 1-0 victory at Burnley on Wednesday sent them top. Who is going to win the title now?

Manchester City already hold the record for most consecutive FA Cup semi-finals - eight between 2019 and 2026 - but can they become the first team to reach four finals in a row? That is their target when they play Championship side Southampton at Wembley on Saturday at 17:15 BST, live on BBC One and Radio 5 Live. It will be interesting to see whether City boss Pep Guardiola changes his team up much, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. They don't play again until they go to Everton on 4 May, so I don't think he will. But, whoever Pep picks, he will be looking for his team to connect again, the way they were playing before they played Burnley . As well as the FA Cup, Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. For all of this weekend's games, he takes on Tottenham fan Alfie Watts, co-host of the Race Across the World: The Detour visual podcast.

In this work, we take a fresh look at some old and new algorithms for off-policy, return-based reinforcement learning. Expressing these in a common form, we derive a novel algorithm, Retrace(λ), with three desired properties: (1) it has low variance; (2) it safely uses samples collected from any behaviour policy, whatever its degree of "off-policyness"; and (3) it is efficient as it makes the best use of samples collected from near on-policy behaviour policies. We analyze the contractive nature of the related operator under both off-policy policy evaluation and control settings and derive online sample-based algorithms. We believe this is the first return-based off-policy control algorithm converging a.s. to Q without the GLIE assumption (Greedy in the Limit with Infinite Exploration). As a corollary, we prove the convergence of Watkins' Q(λ), which was an open problem since 1989. We illustrate the benefits of Retrace(λ) on a standard suite of Atari 2600 games. One fundamental trade-off in reinforcement learning lies in the definition of the update target: should one estimate Monte Carlo returns or bootstrap from an existing Q-function?

Two of the teams fighting relegation meet on Sunday when Tottenham host Nottingham Forest, but are there more than just points at stake? If we do get a winner here, it is a huge boost for that team psychologically going into the international break, said BBC Sport football expert Chris Sutton. But, for the losing manager, it could mean the sack. That applies to Forest's Vitor Pereira as well as Igor Tudor at Spurs - this is a classic game where triumph or disaster awaits both clubs. Sutton is making predictions for all 380 Premier League games this season, against AI, BBC Sport readers and a variety of guests. His guests for week 31 are Amari Bacchus and Genesis Lynea, stars of new CBBC drama series Crookhaven. Crookhaven begins with a double bill on Sunday, 22 March at 15:05 GMT on BBC One and BBC iPlayer, and at 17:25 on CBBC. The full series will be available to watch on BBC iPlayer from this date.

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