World Cup Qatar 2022 - Can you guess who will win? - AI predictor game by Al Jazeera

The FIFA Football World Cup was held in the Arab world for the first time in history in 2022.

To mark one of the world’s biggest sporting events, at the start of the tournament, Al Jazeera introduced Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) robot, to crunch the numbers and predict the results of each game.

After every day of action, Kashef downloaded the day’s data and compared it with more than 200 metrics, including the number of wins, goals scored and FIFA rankings, from matches played over the past century, totalling more than 100,000 records, to see who was most likely to win the following day.

The prediction game, as well as its accompanying historical interactive dashboard and exploratory data visualisations proved to be a huge hit among our readers gathering hundreds of thousands of plays.

While other news outlets may have also had their own prediction engines, Al Jazeera’s was remarkably accurate, correctly predicting two out of three matches (67 percent of results).

Our AI model was built using Google Cloud's Vertex AI, which produces state-of-the-art models - adopting Google Brain - that use Efficient Neural Architecture Search (ENAS) to find the best prediction model. The data pipeline is built with GCP-BigQuery.

Our editorial storytelling project was featured at the Google Cloud Leaders Connect Event in 2022.

The 64-match experience demonstrated our English and Arabic readers’ appreciation for well crafted technical storytelling that was not only informative but also playful.