Artificial Intelligence Predicts Ronde van Vlaanderen Winner
Move over Neuromancer and Wintermute, a super powerful Belgian AI has emerged on the scene to crash helicopters and plant enticing codes for human immortality inside ornate boxes predict bike races.
Its prediction? That Mathieu van der Poel will win the Tour of Flanders. Did we need an AI to tell us that?
The top five will look as follows:
- Mathieu van der Poel
- Greg Van Avermaet
- Wout van Aert
- Oliver Naesen
- Jasper Stuyven
Which isn’t a terrible list, to be honest, but we’re finding it hard to imagine how Van Avermaet ends up between van der Poel and van Aert.
How does it work? The creators of the AI say “We built a machine learning model to predict who will win the race. We do this purely based on objective data such as historical race results and the rider profiles. Our machine learning algorithm looks at the different patterns in the data and predicts the full race results. We update our predictions weekly, as new cycling results are coming in.”
Doesn’t sound drastically different to what we do inside our own heads, to be quite honest, although presumably the computer isn’t trying to kill itself with whiskey every night.
They simplify it into a three step process: “We take into consideration the past 20 years of cycling data. Based on the data, we built a machine learning model that estimates who has the highest chance of winning. We take into consideration the rider’s track record, his current performance and how he matches with that particular race.”
So basically, the big difference with Cyclry’s model is that we largely ignore everything that’s happened in the last 20 years.
It’s a very cool tool. Cross analysis with Reddit’s fantasy league suggests the AI would be sitting in fourth place. That’s probably good enough for you to use it to automate your cycling gambling.
Explore the English language version of AI-powered cycling predictor, Who Will Win the Race. As a disclaimer, this news dropped on April 1, so it might just be a guy saying ‘beep beep’ behind the scenes for attention.