AI predicts PUBG player placement from stats and rankings

There’s a reason battle royale games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (commonly abbreviated “PUBG”) and Epic Games’ Fortnite have hundreds of millions of players collectively: They’re exciting. Tens of player characters spawn simultaneously in unpredictable places, where they battle it out to the death as the game map gradually shrinks in size. The roster is eventually whittled down to a single player, who’s crowned the winner.

Fun as the element of surprise may be, matches might be less dynamic than they seem. That’s the assertion of researchers at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Georgia, who tested several AI algorithms to predict final player placement in PUBG from in-game stats and initial rankings.