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Story highlights
Software program says it has successfully predicted outcome of round of 16 World Cup games
Program named after the AI character in Microsoft's Halo video games
But who will reach World Cup semifinals?
We’ve had octopuses, camels and turtles providing World Cup predictions, but now a computer software program has got in on the act of forecasting football matches.
And, according to Microsoft, their recently released software program Cortana had a 100% success rate in predicting the winners in Brazil 2014’s round of 16 games.
Like Apple’s Siri, MIcrosoft’s virtual assistant Cortana – named after the AI character in its Halo video games and voiced by the same actress – is using a number of indicators to predict the winners of World Cup matches.
“For the tournament our models evaluate the strength of each team through a variety of factors such as previous win/loss/tie record in qualification matches and other international competitions and margin of victory in these contests” said Microsoft’s Bing blog.
One of the Cortana software developers Mouni Reddy tweeted: “If she gets the United States-Belgium game right we are officially living in the matrix.”
And so it proved with Belgium beating Team USA 2-1 after extra time.
So if you don’t want to know which teams will reach the World Cup semifinals look away now.
If you’re still reading, Cortana predicts Germany will beat France, hosts Brazil will triumph over Colombia, Argentina getting the better of Belgium and the Netherlands knocking out Costa Rica.
