LANSING ? Supported Intelligence, an advanced analytics company that was started several years ago by economist Patrick Anderson of Anderson Economic Group, have come up with an innovative way to generate some publicity for the product, a tool that helps financial folks make intelligent choices, like which stocks are likely to increase in value.

Supported Intelligence used its Rapid Recursive Toolbox to pick the winners in the NCAA Men?s Basketball Tournament. Perhaps more surprising, its SmartBracket, after the first week of competition, is ranked in the 95th percentile of the ESPN Tournament Challenge against some 11 million or so competitors.

The idea for the SmartBracket challenge came from Neal Anderson, Patrick’s son, a recent physics and music graduate from the University of Michigan. Neal now serves as product developer.

?It?s a publicity gimmick,? said Neal Anderson. ?We?ve had some trouble breaking out of obscurity. What we wanted to show is our toolbox can out pick the other pickers. We?ve beat more than 90 percent of our competitors. Our goal was only 75 percent.?

SmartBracket applies a sophisticated algorithm to pick teams that increase one?s chances of winning a pool by maximizing their score relative to that of their opponents. It uses both tournament predictions and opponent picks to craft a bracket designed to score points when your opponents don?t, and break even when they do.

In the real business world, the Rapid Recursive Toolbox enables users to quickly compose and solve recursive economic models with applications in Marketing Strategy, Supply Chain Management, Public Policy, and Theoretical economics. Its really aimed at stock brokers, financial managers, and other similar folks. A basic commercial package starts around $2,000 with some of the more sophisticated applications selling for upwards of $100,000.

If nothing else, the SmartBracket challenge has increased traffic to the Supported Intelligence web site by 10-fold, Neal Anderson said, and increased the number of Facebook fans by a factor of four.

To learn more, Click on SupportedIntelligence.Com