Computer Software to Predict the Unpredictable

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."

Comments

computer?

[onemorehour]

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

Re:computer?

[schwaang]

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.

Re:computer?

[thrawn_aj]

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.

Well...

[427_ci_505]

Didn't see that one coming.

bullshit flag

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:bullshit flag

[zeromorph]

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.

It's A TRAP!

[lennier]

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...

Ridiculous

[Reality Master 101]

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.

Reason

[HTH NE1]

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."

We will finally know...

[Sunshinerat]

..when Duke Nukem Forever will be released.

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

Re:Can it predict the weather six months out?

[onemorehour]

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.