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Week 8 of the NFL season is here, and Cortana is back to make picks in a head-to-head showdown with Elo.
We looked at two popular systems used to pick NFL games: Cortana, Microsoft's digital assistant, and Elo, the modeling system used by Nate Silver's data-journalism site, FiveThirtyEight. In both cases, the computers are picking outright winners and not against the spread. However, each gives a likelihood that a team will win - which, in theory, could help measure the strength of certain lines.
Cortana is off to a strong start this season, correctly picking 73% of the games over the last four weeks and 68% overall. Elo has also nailed 68% over the last four weeks and is not far behind overall at 60%. Cortana went 11-3 in Week 7 and Elo was 8-6.
Here are the picks for Week 8, with each model's percent chance of winning in parentheses. Point spreads are just for reference, via Vegas Insider as of Thursday morning.