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28 March 2024

Fifa World Cup 2014: Microsoft beats Google and Siri in predictions

Published
By Joseph George

It was Paul the Octopus in 2010, but this time around, it is Microsoft’s Cortana that has emerged winner in predicting World Cup results.

Cortana, powered by Bing, got almost all the results correct except for one, thereby overtaking both Google and Apple’s Siri.

“Thanks to Bing, Cortana has accurately predicted the winner in 15 out of 16 games,” said the latest blog post by Windows.

Bing launched its Bing Predicts ahead of the world Cup and got 100 per cent accurate results for all the group level matches and final elimination rounds, except for the third place match where it picked Brazil as opposed to the Netherlands.

According to Microsoft, the engine looks at the strength of each team through a variety of factors such as previous wins/losses/ties in qualification matches, other international competitions and margin of the victories in these competitions.

“Then other adjustments are made related to other factors that might give a team advantages over others like home field advantage (for Brazil), proximity (for South American teams like finalist Argentina), playing surface (hybrid grass), game-time weather conditions, and other factors,” the post said.

In comparison, Google too got the right winners except for the results of two games. Like Microsoft, it had predicted a Brazilian win in the match against Netherlands for the third place while it also wrongly predicted France to beat Germany in the quarterfinals.

Ahead of the final match both Cortana and Google had predicted a win for Germany. Apple’s Siri on the other hand had pitched for an Argentine win.

Who will win Fifa Football World Cup? Time to ask your 'smart'phone...

Google says it has been using its Google Cloud Platform to make predictions for the World Cup – analysing data, building a statistical model and using machine learning to predict outcomes of each match since the group round.