SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - May 9, 2016) - If you've been following the predictions made by UNU, a new "Swarm Intelligence" platform from Unanimous A.I., you might bet on the Kentucky Derby this weekend and won big, really BIG. That's because a day before the race, UNU's picks were published for the first four horses, in order. It's a bet called the Superfecta that paid 540 to 1 odds. And that's exactly how the horses came in. And this is not the first stunning pick UNU has made.

How is this possible? It goes back to the birds and bees. Ants too. And fish. From swarms and flocks, to schools and colonies -- countless species have evolved techniques to amplify their intelligence in closed-loop systems that pool their insights and converge on optimal decisions. Biologists call this "Swarm Intelligence" and it allows groups to amplify their collective IQ beyond the capacity of individuals, proving the old adage -- many minds are better than one.

Until recently, the human species has been unable to take advantage of this fundamental biological technique, for we didn't evolve the ability to swarm. Enter Unanimous A.I., a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2014 by serial entrepreneur and researcher Dr. Louis Rosenberg. The core question Rosenberg set out to answer was: Can humans swarm, and if so can we amplify our intelligence beyond the ability of individuals? The answer appears to be a resounding yes.

Unanimous spent the last two years building a swarm intelligence platform called UNU that enables groups to get together as online swarms -- combining their thoughts, opinions, and intuitions in real-time to answer questions, make predictions, reach decisions, and even play games as a unified collective intelligence. To quantify how smart these UNU swarms really are, researchers at Unanimous regularly convene swarms and ask them to make predictions on high profile events, testing whether or not many minds are truly better than one.

UNU has made headlines in recent months by predicting the Oscars better than the experts, even besting the renowned forecasters at FiveThirtyEight. UNU also surprised the sports world by predicting the NCAA college bowl games with 70% accuracy against the spread, earning +34% return on Vegas odds. But still, the fact that average people could use UNU to amplify their collective intelligence so dramatically was met with cautious resistance.

Enter Hope Reese, a reporter from TechRepublic. Two weeks ago, she challenged Unanimous A.I. to use UNU to predict the winners of the Kentucky Derby.

"We were reluctant to take this challenge," says David Baltaxe, Chief Information Officer at Unanimous. "Nobody here knows anything about horseracing, and it's notorious for being unpredictable. Still, UNU surprises us again and again, so we recruited a swarm of volunteers through an online ad. The whole thing took 20 minutes."

Here's how it worked. During a first 10-minute session, the group used UNU to answer questions as a unified Swarm Intelligence, narrowing the field of 20 horses down to four winners. The swarm was then asked to order the four winners into Win, Place, Show, and Fourth. Then, a week later the Kentucky Derby announced the post positions of the horses, which impacts the potential outcome. So, the Swarm Intelligence was convened again, and asked if any changes should be made. One of the four picks was replaced by an alternate. This process took another 10 minutes.

The picks were then reported to the reporter at TechRepublic, who published her story the day before the race was run. The article conveyed skepticism, quoting an expert who said if this really worked, it would disrupt gambling markets.

The expert was right -- gambling may never be the same. That's because 24 hours later, the 142nd Kentucky Derby was run and the four winning horses were in the exact order that UNU predicted. The odds of making such a pick, known as a "superfecta," were 540 to 1. This means that anyone who bet $100 on the published picks in TechRepublic would have made $54,000.

In fact, the TechRepublic reporter, Hope Reese, put down a bet herself on UNU's superfecta and won big. As did many readers, who have been emailing their appreciation to Unanimous A.I.

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