An Artificially Intelligent Sports Tipper

Abstract

This paper presents a description of an artificially intelligent model for predicting the outcome of particular sporting contests. Sports prediction (or “tipping”) contests are a common pastime among sports fans worldwide. Many participants in these contests have developed their own systems (computerised or otherwise) with which they select winners. The major problems with these systems however is that the user is often swayed by emotion, misguided intuition, or they do not capture enough meaningful information about the competing teams. The work described here is an attempt to extract insightful information from sporting contests in an effort to make objective predictions about likely winners. It is not meant as an aid to gambling, but rather an interesting case study of using neural networks for predicting probabilistic events in a sporting scenario.