Now, I’m not a huge sports fan as the misleading title would indicate, but since we talked about artificial intelligence, and building on the previous post, I thought I’d share with you a story about an AI program that can play fantasy football (in this case meaning soccer) better than any human being. Well, not every human being, but almost.

In the ieee Spectrum, there is a story about a team of computer scientists whose program can beat 99 percent of all human fantasy football players. In case you’re unfamiliar, fantasy football players create teams from all players in a sport, and when the actual player makes a play the fantasy player is awarded points for the team.

That still leaves the 2500 players the system *can’t* beat, and these people must be serious fantasy football players. Now, whether or not this is an AI or an expert system would depend on how it was programmed, how its rules are implemented, and how it makes its choices, it could even be a combination of principles from both.

It’s when any of the following start to think for themselves that we’re in trouble:

This is just a picture, but the terror is very real.