New Meta UFC ranking system was made with A.I. but doesn’t use A.I. – ‘It’s a mathematical model’

Hold onto your butts, fighters: Facebook is now in charge of the UFC rankings.

Monday saw the rollout of the new Meta UFC Rankings, a mathematical model designed to take the subjectivity and alleged favoritism out of the long-maligned press-led ranking system. For now, both ranking systems are on display at UFC.com. But barring some serious screw-ups by the new Meta system (Meta is the parent company of Facebook), the plan is to phase out the human voting system in the future.

An important distinction that was made during a presentation with partnered media: this is not an A.I. system, despite certain comments UFC CEO Dana White made about it over the past several months. The ‘Elo rating system’ is a ‘mathematical method.’

“We didn’t build an A.I. to rank fighters,” a UFC representative said, according to CBS Sports. “A.I. was used in creating the system, but on a week to week basis, when you see the rankings come out, it’s not because A.I. said so. A mathematical model is doing the work on the back end, computing things and spitting out numbers. Those numbers are ranked.”

“There is no intelligence. It’s not smart. It cannot see. It doesn’t judge … This is math.”

That math allows the system to theoretically run completely hands off.

“There are no decisions made week-to-week,” the rep said. “All the decisions have already been made. From now until the death of the universe, there are rules, and the rules will be followed. That’s how mathematical models work. It’s based on assumptions, and those assumptions are baked into the system.”

The math is still largely focused on who wins every weekend at the latest UFC event.

“Did you win and who you beat effectively accounts for 95% of why someone is ranked,” CBS Sports was told.

That doesn’t leave much power to other factors, but according to the reps a finish gives an extra push, while fight stats such as significant strikes and takedowns are completely left out of the equation. After 18 months of inactivity, a fighter’s ranking will start to ‘decay.’ Fights that are more than five years old start weighing less on a fighter’s rankings as well, implying everyone’s scores could change on a week to week basis as old achievements are worth less points.

“The goal was not to try to take human rankings and redo them with math,” outlets were told. “The goal was to try and do something different, and ideally better. These are not going to look and work exactly like human-style rankings. That’s not a weakness. You can decide if it’s a strength or not when you see it, but it’s not a weakness. Which is to say if things are different, that’s intentional.”

We’ll see how this math-based model holds up over the coming weeks, and if it can possibly capture the wild and strange things that go on inside the cage without a little human intervention to add some common sense to potentially misleading data.