Can anyone see how they use the data to form a result? It specifically says they do not poll & average the responses, but it doesn't say what actually happens.

I guess that might be the secret sauce, but can anyone educated-guess it for me?

I don't know what algorithms they use, but they don't seem to be any kind of secret sauce. It seems like the relevant computation is done by human brains playing their web game.

http://go.unu.ai/lobby

Seems like a misnomer. The article's description of 'swarm intelligence' [1] sounds more like 'wisdom of the crowd' [2].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd

They (not really sure if associated with UNU) explain the difference here. http://unanimous.ai/crowds-vs-swarms-which-is-smarter/

With that said I don't see how they let you network.

"Wisdom of the crowd" was exactly my thought, too. I didn't know it was 2004 today...

How well would this work when the right opinion is far outside the popular consensus? For example, can a predictive mechanism like this pick stocks and beat the S&P 500?

Soon it'll be making predictions about fighting 1 horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses.