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Week 4 of the NFL season is here, and Microsoft's Cortana is back to make picks in a head-to-head showdown with Elo.
We took a look at two popular systems used to pick NFL games: Cortana, Microsoft's digital assistant, and Elo, the modeling system used by Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. In both cases, the computers are picking outright winners and not against the spread. However, each gives a likelihood of a team's winning, which, in theory, could help measure the strength of certain lines.
Cortana won the regular season matchup last season, going 162-78 (68%) overall, and 111-38 (75%) over the last ten weeks (we did not track Week 17 because of the wonky nature of the final week). Elo was not far behind, going 154-86 (64%) overall.
Cortana is off to a strong start in 2018, going 19-12-1 the last two weeks. Elo has struggled, going 15-16-1.
Here are the picks for Week 4, with each model's percent chance of winning in parentheses. Point spreads are just for reference, via Vegas Insider as of Thursday morning.