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Week 5 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 year, 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 30-16-1 the last three weeks. Elo is not far behind at 26-20-1. Both models went 11-4 in Week 4.
Here are the picks for Week 5, with each model's percent chance of winning in parentheses. Point spreads are just for reference, via Vegas Insider as of Thursday morning.