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Computer Software to Predict the Unpredictable

Posted by samzenpus on from the zombo-com dept.

Amigan writes "Professor Jerzy Rozenblit at the University of Arizona was awarded $2.2Million to develop software to predict the unpredictable — specifically relating to volatile political and military situations." From the article: "The software will predict the actions of paramilitary groups, ethnic factions, terrorists and criminal groups, while aiding commanders in devising strategies for stabilizing areas before, during and after conflicts. It also will have many civilian applications in finance, law enforcement, epidemiology and the aftermath of natural disasters, such as hurricane Katrina."

27 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. computer? by onemorehour · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sure, no problem. The software should work fine, as long as you find a computer powerful and irrational enough to run it.

    1. Re:computer? by schwaang · · Score: 5, Funny

      I'm absolutely certain such systems would be greeted as liberators from the drudgery of all the planning we do now for these complicated military and political situations.

    2. Re:computer? by thrawn_aj · · Score: 5, Informative
      Of course, you would also read that not all systems are inherently chaotic. It is by no means obvious that human society is complex enough to be called unpredictable in principle. People who tout their own "free will" should think long and hard about that and realize that simply being able to imagine a multitude of choices does not mean that each is likely to occur. Remember that a human being living in society has more in common with an electron BOUND in a crystal than a free electron. The former has several constraints while the latter is in principle unpredictable.

      Readers of Asimov will know the qualitative reasons for why such things as broad socio-economic-historical trends and the actions of large groups of people can in principle be made predictable. For a system to be chaotic, it must have a large PHASE SPACE of possibilities (physical size is not always important but it is significant). What matters is the degrees of freedom and how parts of the system are coupled to other parts. Do small perturbations in the system dissipate or do they spread? Modern society has evolved into a 2-phase system where it reacts to new perturbations by simply breaking them into two possibilities - this helps relieve tensions and most people get stuck in one of the two states. This has the rather fascinating effect of re-stabilizing the system despite the introduced disturbance.

      So, as the above example leads us to suspect, modern human societies are just not as complex as our egos would lead us to believe. There is strong coupling between its parts and few people stay undecided about issues - they simply get stuck orbiting one of two strong attractors in the space of possibilities and this serves to relieve any stress. In such a system of course, revolutions (in the sense of widely held beliefs changing within the lifetime of a single individual) simply cannot happen. At the worst, there might be a slow decay and unraveling of the social fabric. Barely noticeable.

      Equivalent arguments apply to the "free will" of individual human beings. Humans tend to congregate in packs - behaviorally, philosophically or otherwise. This strong tribal leaning that is presumably built into our genes ensures that most behavior patterns will be statistical in nature. Indeed, the actions of an individual can be simply predicted to a first approximation by merely qualitative means even in the absence of complete information by assuming rational behavior. A better approximation can be achieved by modeling the level of rationality of the individual and assigning probabilities based on that.

      While human beings may not be predictable in a strictly deductive sense, most people are (for better or for worse) rather mundane in terms of how eccentric they can be (in a way that actually affects other parts of society). This can hardly be a bad thing as the timescale of societal change must be greater than the lifetime of an individual for a society to be called "stable". If it is MUCH greater, we would call that society degenerate or decayed.

    3. Re:computer? by Jame_Retief · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are, of course, presuming that Asimov was doing more than writing good FICTION. I sincerely doubt that any program will have any noticeable success in predicting anything, regardless of the wads of cash thrown at it to make it 'better'. Remember all the computers in the classroom priorities of the last few decades? How many of you used a computer in ANY bloody classroom that did not relate directly to the class? (ie- C+ programming {more likely FORTRAN}).

    4. Re:computer? by smellotron · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It is by no means obvious that human society is complex enough to be called unpredictable in principle... While human beings may not be predictable in a strictly deductive sense, most people are (for better or for worse) rather mundane in terms of how eccentric they can be (in a way that actually affects other parts of society).

      There's still the issue of dealing with the tail end of any distribution. I don't care about the 99.999% of people who, in the aggregate, fit a model. I care about that 0.001% of people who are going to completely blow it (because, as always, "past performance does not implly future performance").

    5. Re:computer? by Jame_Retief · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I disagree. A chaos predictor cannot be more accurate than simple guessing, for it is attempting to predict chaotic events. Look at the political scene in the US; given the current climate everyone is attempting to say that the Democrats are going to take the election (and they might). It is just as likely that one of the Republicans will nose over the line (especially with the right third-party candidate). We know his system well and experts can only call a race with 50% accuracy, even with just two candidates in most races. The human mind is far more complex and makes far more calculations, with random associations for a computer to predict anything about what a group of people will do. I will be impressed if we see a program, ever, that hits greater than 20% reliability on predicting events or trends.

  2. Well... by 427_ci_505 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Didn't see that one coming.

  3. bullshit flag by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Go ahead and predict the weather for a week. I will be impressed.

    Predict it for 2 weeks, I will blow you.

    You cannot predict something with so many variables that you don't understand. You certainly cannot do it regarding how people will react.

    1. Re:bullshit flag by zeromorph · · Score: 5, Insightful

      bullshit flag

      I second that.

      The whole article is totally bizarre and buzzword populated begging for attention. Not only will it predict the actions of nearly every bunch of lunatics it will also "display data in graphical, 3-D and other forms that can be quickly grasped".

      Please! We have a highly complex situation, with a lot of different agents and a long genesis, and literally millions of different contextual factors influencing the situation and they take all this munch and crunch it a little with fancy buzzword concepts and put it in a pie chart?

      This is an insultingly brazen self-adulation.

      While the software ultimately could save millions of lives,...

      Ok, I changed my mind I'm gonna die laughing.

      --
      "Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
  4. It's A TRAP! by lennier · · Score: 5, Funny

    The Asymmetric Threat Response and Analysis Project, known as ATRAP, is a massively complex set of computer algorithms (mathematical procedures) that sift through millions of pieces of data.

    They come right out and say it...

    --
    You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
    1. Re:It's A TRAP! by hazem · · Score: 3, Funny

      Well, it's natural considering its predecessor was the Complex Response Analysis Project, but after huge overruns, that project had to be flushed.

  5. Ridiculous by Reality+Master+101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Apparently there are those that have forgotten the old computer law of "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Even if we had a perfect model to predict these sort of things, we don't have any way of supplying the required data to model the prediction. What's the computer going to do, go undercover in secret groups? Read the web sites? Listen to radio chatter and analyze their conversations?

    Maybe someday when we have a real science of A.I. something like this might be possible, but all it shows is that this university professor will happily take government money for delivering absolutely nothing.

    --
    Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
    1. Re:Ridiculous by ChrisMounce · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Maybe someday when we have a real science of A.I. something like this might be possible, but all it shows is that this university professor will happily take government money for delivering absolutely nothing.
      He has already perfected the software and is using it to game the grant system.
  6. Reason by HTH+NE1 · · Score: 5, Funny
    From "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency," by Douglas Adams,
    New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

    "Well," he said, "it's to do with the project which first made the software incarnation of the company profitable. It was called Reason, and in its own way it was sensational."

    "What was it?"

    "Well, it was a kind of back-to-front program. It's funny how many of the best ideas are just an old idea back-to-front. You see, there have already been several programs written that help you make decisions by properly ordering and analysing all the relevant facts.... The drawback with these is that the decision which all the properly ordered and analyzed facts point to is not necessarily the one you want.

    "... Gordon's great insight was to design a program which allowed you to specify in advance what decision you wished it to reach, and only then to give it all the facts. The program's task, ... was simply to construct a plausible series of logical-sounding steps to connect the premises with the conclusion." ....

    "Heavens. And did the program sell very well?"

    "No, we never sold a single copy.... The entire project was bought up, lock, stock, and barrel, by the Pentagon. The deal put WayForward on a very sound financial foundation. Its moral foundation, on the other hand, is not something I would want to trust my weight to. I've recently been analyzing a lot of the arguments put forward in favor of the Star Wars project, and if you know what you're looking for, the pattern of the algorithms is very clear.

    "So much so, in fact, that looking at Pentagon policies over the last couple of years I think I can be fairly sure that the US Navy is using version 2.00 of the program, while the Air Force for some reason only has the beta-test version of 1.5. Odd, that."
    --
    Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
  7. If it is unpredictable... by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...the program will still fail to predict it. By definition.

    The article (as would be unsurprising even from the professional press, and is less surprising from what seems to be a school newspaper of the school employing the professor getting the grant) seems to be a very uncritical regurgitation of an extraordinarily puffed-up press release that seems to suggest that the professor has gotten a grant to develop something that already exist and presently has the capacities sought by the grant. Sometimes. Maybe. Really, the shifting use of verb tenses gave me a kind of mental whiplash trying to read it.

    Also, I think that while this may be useful, the danger of overreliance on a system where quite literally no one using it understands how factors are really being used to generate outcome predictions are immense; if you get something that works well predictively at all, it will likely be prone to fail wildly if any of the many factors it is adapted to based on the historical data used to train it shift. Unfortunately, it is quite likely that the particular sensitivities will be opaque, and thus no one is likely to know when it is likely to fail. This is rather distinct from conventional analysis which, even though it may fail in many circumstances, where it is rigorous analysis and not just guesswork to start with, its assumptions are transparent and its weaknesses and vulnerabilities in application to particular situations can also be evaluated.

  8. We will finally know... by Sunshinerat · · Score: 5, Funny

    ..when Duke Nukem Forever will be released.

    And to be honest, this alone is worth the expense.

    --
    Load New Commander (Y/N)?
  9. Re:Can it predict the weather six months out? by onemorehour · · Score: 5, Funny

    Can it predict the weather six months out?

    Of course it can--did you even read the link?

    It will just take about six months to calculate the result.

  10. Didn't People Learn Anything from The Matrix? by CodeBuster · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about..."

    -- Agent Smith

  11. Read "Minority Report" By P.K. Dick. by khasim · · Score: 4, Informative

    The short story, not the movie. They're completely different. It covers exactly this situation.

    Precog #1 sees the future.

    Precog #2 sees the future that happens when you know what Precog #1 saw.

    Precog #3 sees the future that happens when you know what Precog #2 saw which was the future that Precog #1 saw.

  12. The Chinese plan... by meburke · · Score: 4, Funny

    Chinese researchers today announced $10.2 million (USD) funding for a system to predict the outcomes of unpredictable outcomes predicted and influenced by US ATRAP computing, with the goal of further influencing the the outcomes to produce a balance-of-trade advantage for China and producing a complete domination of Taiwan...

    --
    "The mind works quicker than you think!"
  13. Rozenblit's work on coevolution/genetic algorithms by FleaPlus · · Score: 4, Informative

    For anybody who wants a little more info than is present in the popular-press summary, here's a couple of conference papers from Rozenblit's group on using coevolution and genetic algorithms to analyze/visualize military scenarios. I think they might require institutional subscriptions to see the full PDF, but I've pasted the abstracts below.

    A coevolutionary approach to course of action generation and visualization in multi-sided conflicts

    The current state of military operations includes many stability and support (SASO), multi-sided conflicts. The research presented in this paper attempts to address this complex environment by creating a SASO simulation, coevolutionary generation of courses-of-actions (COAs) for each side, and visualization tools for analysis of the resulting COAs. The SASO simulation is significantly different from previous systems because it incorporates non-conventional warfare units such as terrorists and media. The coevolution algorithm is different because it allows all sides of the conflict to evolve their COAs. The visualization tools are important because SASO doctrine is not as well developed as conventional warfare doctrine. Therefore, visual analysis and understanding of a system that is not well defined provides insight for future modeling and verification.

    Modeling and simulation of stability and support operations (SASO)

    Stability and support operations (SASO) are becoming increasingly important in modern military operations. Conflicts are no longer comprised solely of two opposing sides engaged in combat on an open battlefield. Instead, they are more likely to involve groups sharing various alliances and relationships each pursuing a range of different goals. The Sheherazade SASO wargaming engine presented here: a) incorporates subjective criteria for scoring course of action (COA) success such as the animosity between factions and attitudes of locales, b) uses nontraditional units such as refugees, media and information operators, and c) employs a coevolutionary genetic algorithm in modeling the dynamics of the complex multisided simulation for generating COAs. This paper outlines our approach towards the development of a wargaming model that handles the more complex and computationally demanding arena of SASO.

  14. Cease and Desist Order by MrCopilot · · Score: 3, Funny
    Professor Jerzy Rozenblit,

    Be advised the Foundation has Patents covering the areas of study and interest.

    H. Seldon

    --
    OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
  15. I for one... by tjstork · · Score: 4, Funny

    Welcome the flim flam predicting the unpredictable coding in a bunch of random number generating overlords.

    What a waste of 2 million bucks.

    --
    This is my sig.
  16. You don't get it by passthecrackpipe · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It isn't about actually being able to predict anything useful. Think of it like this. As a "World Leader" [sic], how much would you spend on the Ultimate Cop-Out(tm)? yeah a few million is a *bargain* for what this thing can do. None of the people involved in this project are actually interested in the predictions. What they are interested in is that the *next* time they have a royal screw up, they can say: "well, its unfortunate this happened, but you see, we have really smart supercomputer. It has 3-D and stuff. And it tells us what is most likely to happen. This wasn't on the list. We only have limited resources, and this is the best way to focus those resources where they are most likely to be doing us good".

    Its the ultimate repudiation. As far as I can predict, they will spend lots and lots more money on this, get some buddies in on the gravy train somewhere to boot, and they still got themselves a bargain.

    --
    People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
  17. We need real leaders, not computers by Pedrito · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "...and the aftermath of natural disasters, such as Katrina."

    Dealing with the aftermath of Katrina wasn't a matter of applying rocket science. It was simply a matter of simple logistics and a government that gives a shit about people. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has shown time and again under this administration that it could care less for the lives of its citizens, let alone the citizens of other countries. These problems can't be fixed by software. They can only be fixed by real leadership, something the people of the U.S. haven't shown much interest in electing...

    It doesn't take software to predict that going into Iraq was a huge mistake. Just ask Chaney circa 1994. He knew it would be a major mistake, and he wasn't the only one. A lot of us were yelling and screaming to stop it before it started...

    Software can't predict the future nor can they predict what stupid leaders will do. On Sept 10th, could anyone (or more importantly, any software) predict what things would be like in this country today? Even remotely? The war in Iraq, a country completely disconnected from 9/11. Guantanamo, spying on our citizens and other erosions of liberty... I doubt it. A single event and the responses by inept leadership led to a variety of disasters that nothing and nobody could have predicted.

  18. It'll have great military applications by Centurix · · Score: 4, Funny

    Major: Sir, the computer has given us a plausible scenario for operation Sandy Whirlwind
    General: OK Major, lets see what this pile of junk has to say for itself
    Major: It says that we can overcome all undesirable outcomes by sending in CL22 using a classic scissor movement.
    General: Let me see that! How did the computer even know about CL22, our crack regiment of killer circus clowns! That's amazing!
    Major: There's more sir. It also talks about project CC.
    General: Project CC! The stealth car capable of carrying thousands of CL22 troops in a vehicle the same size as Robin Reliant? How did the computer even know about that project, it's only been discussed between myself and my 2 year old daughter!
    Major: This program is amazing sir. Have another star.

    --
    Task Mangler
  19. Music by Stooshie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A nice analogy when people think computers can make decisions or have "Artificial Intelligence" of any merit.

    Pupil (Excited about AI):- I have just written a programme that writes music in the style of JS Bach.
    Tutor (Seen it all before):- Really? How does that work then?
    Pupil:- I programmed all of the known manuscripts by Bach and the computer uses that to write new compositions.
    Tutor:- Great, can it write in the style of Mozart?
    Pupil:- Sure, give me all the compositions by Mozart and I'll show you.
    Tutor:- You mis-understand, can it decide, of it's own volition, to write in the style of Mozart.
    Pupil:- Well, no it needs to base it's composition on something.
    Tutor:- It has the entire works of Bach, is that not enough?
    Pupil:- No, it needs the entire works of Mozart to write in the style of Mozart. Hell, even music students need to have heard Mozart in order to write in the style of Mozart.
    Tutor:- Oh, so how did Mozart do it then?

    --
    America, Home of the Brave. ... .and the Squaw.