Cortana predicts Oscar winners, gets 83% awards right

Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant is becoming quite the oracle these days. After correctly predicting winners of NFL playoffs with a 9:2 ratio, she went on to predict the Oscar winners. Out of the 24 categories, Cortana faltered on only 4 giving her a 83% win ratio.

Cortana got the best movie, best actor and actress, best director, best supporting actress among other awards right without blinking an eye. Its not so much clairvoyance as it is clever programming which is the brainchild of Microsoft researcher David Rothschild. Cortana uses Bing Search to predict Oscars, NFL games, World Cup soccer and more such events.

David earlier, with the use of data-driven algorithms, had predicted correctly the winners of 50 states in the 2012 US Election barring one.

Source: TechNet