As most of the world knows by now, Republican nominee Donald Trump won the Presidential Elections of 2016 this morning against Democratic Hillary Clinton. The sudden sweep of red states was an unexpected game changer in the election and almost everybody missed the mark, even Bing.
Bing Predicts is known for calculating the outcomes of popular global events such as sports championships, entertainment awards, and legislative elections. In this particular case, Bing saw fit to grant Clinton the win with a comfortable margin. We even saw Bing Predicts give as high as 90% probability in the lady’s favor. But as the night went on, it dwindled to leave Trump with the majority of electoral votes and the presidency on the horizon.
WinBeta reached out to Microsoft for an answer to exactly how Bing was so far off the outcome. A spokesperson replied:
“Bing Predicts uses several sources including search, web, social data, third-parties and more to inform predictions. True to the nature of all predictions, we can never guarantee 100% accuracy.”
Bing wasn’t the only prediction to guess wrongly. In fact, most major news and analysist predictions were shocked to see just how wrong they were when the results came in from yesterday’s polls.
What does this mean for Bing Predicts? Probably nothing. Simply put, the system can only calculate with data that it is given like we explained here. After all, computers are only as intelligent as mankind creates them to be.
