Can an algorithm win your fantasy football league?

(Credit: Johnny Porthouse/Vimeo Screenshot: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

Human judgment hasn't done much for human development over the last, say, 50 years.

This has allowed machines to take over and begin to dictate.

You'd think that there might be limits. You'd think that politicians were selfless.

The latest machine creation which tries to squeeze the human mind and reduce it to a grape pip is Artificial Intelligence software that picks the perfect fantasy football team.

This is the brainbaby of three academics from the University of Southampton in England.

Lecturer in Computer Science Sarvapali Ramchurn, student Tim Matthews, and visiting researcher and George Chalkiadakis have cobbled together software that, they say, already places it in the top 1 percent of fantasy football players.

Yes, the sport they call football is called soccer by those who don't quite get it yet. And yes, their local team, Southampton is -- in real life -- not terribly good.

But so certain are these three wise men that it will turn even the weakest fantasy player into something of a genius that, according to Phys.Org, they intend to present their work at AAAI-12, the Artificial Intelligence Conference in Toronto next week.

I have always worried... [Read more]