Using a Supercomputer To Predict Revolutions

bLanark writes "A fascinating article from Singularity Hub describes software which, when fed news, makes predictions about forthcoming events. When given information on recent events, it spiked before the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings. It uses various sources including the News Bank which is a database of global news."

Comments

Asmiov did it!

[iluvcapra]

Foundation anyone?

Re:Asmiov did it!

[znerk]

Foundation anyone?

How about Paycheck?.

Philip K Dick is awesome, and his short stories have been made into many more movies than people suspect.

Re:Asmiov did it!

[F34nor]

Moyers: What happens to the idea of the dignity of the human species if population growth continues at its present rate?

Asimov: It will be completely destroyed. I will use what I call my bathroom metaphor. Two people live in an apartment and there are two bathrooms, then both have the freedom of the bathroom. You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, and stay as long as you want, for whatever you need. Everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in the freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, "Aren't you through yet?" and so on.

The same way democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies. The more people there are the less one individual matters.

Re:Asmiov did it!

[tehcyder]

Philip K Dick is awesome, but his short stories have been made into many more astonishingly bad movies than people suspect. ,br> FTFY.

False positive rate?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Spiking" before the Egyptian and Libyan uprisings is nothing impressive, without more information about when it has and hasn't "spiked".

Not really

[nicholas22]

It's much easier to look for spikes or what your data looks like *after* an important event has taken place, than to actually predict them. I'm sure that even if I look at my computer logs on a significant date, there's most likely something there that I would class as interesting or out of the ordinary, in hindsight, too...

Re:Not really

[ColdWetDog]

The obvious question that wasn't in TFA was - did they go back and look at other 'spikes' to see if they meant anything? From the article, the whole process seemed pretty weak intellectually - in the weeks leading up to Mubarak's fall it was clear to anyone with an IQ higher than a typical US politician^Hsnail that something was going to happen - either Mubarak was going to get canned or a lot of Egyptians were going to get in a shitload of trouble.

I don't see anything here that isn't in Google Trends.

??

urbansurvival?

[vlm]

from Singularity Hub describes software which, when fed news, makes predictions about forthcoming events

George Ure gets really feisty and hot under the collar every time someone mentions this and claims its new... He's been doing this for years now, probably a decade now.

http://urbansurvival.com/week.htm

If you want to know what Ure is doing, you can pretty much copy-paste his name on the report and roll all the dates in the report back about a decade.

It would be much like the reaction if I wrote my own crappy homemade webserver this week, and then sent press releases to the entire universe explaining how I just wrote the worlds first webserver and not only that but its also the worlds first open source webserver and carefully avoid mentioning any prior art.

Needs some smoothing

[paiute]

The graph of the "spike" was very unimpressive. The signal-to-noise ratio looks pretty small.

And the moment they get something like this...

[thePuck77]

...we will see martial law declared preemptively, military and police forces will start flooding areas before anything can happen, and people who the computer says will be key figures in the revolution will be preemptively jailed and/or executed.

Don't get your hopes up, kids. This isn't the Foundation, and it won't be used to save civilization, it will be used to keep people already in power from even having a chance of losing that power. If you haven't noticed, the folks running the show think the only value of civilization is that it gives them a system within which to gain power and wealth.

Why do you need a supercomputer for that?

[edibobb]

There's one revolution every 365.25 days or so. Why do you need a supercomputer for that?

predicting past revolutions is hard

[Surt]

But predicting future ones is even more challenging.
Zzzz.

Re:predicting past revolutions is hard

[Eightbitgnosis]

Actually I'd say it's down right impossible to predict something after it's already happened

Like on Wall Street Today?

[Doc Ruby]

What's a "revolution"? The revolts in Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Syria this year? How about the people who have been "occupying" Wall Street the past week? Does getting maced by the cops for no reason at all make a revolt a revolution?

Re:Like on Wall Street Today?

[Billly Gates]

I am praying. We need one and the word was not out and free speech zones were too far awy from Wall Street or the cameras of the media.

If the unemployed got together and rioted 1960s style we would see some real changes. The media's constant attention to it changed society and the country and we need that today

Signs

[TheRealHocusLocus]

Signs of crime: screaming or cries for help.
-- from the Brown Security Crime Prevention Pamphlet
~ [unix fortunes database]

Signs of revolution: screaming or cries for change.

Weather a better predictor

[evilviper]

See PRI story below... But first:

Mining news stories will only tell you what people already knew... Osama Bin Laden? If you asked any experts in the past decade where he was, the answer was always "Pakistan". Everyone assumed he was in the tribal areas, and were wrong. In hindsight, it's easy to say they were within X km, but that information also ceases to be useful in hindsight...

Anyhow, this story isn't a complete waste. It segues nicely into a different story from PRI a couple months ago, which DOES make predictions. It is based on weather, and specifically predicts how many politically unstable countries are likely to experience "violence" (an uprising) in a given year:

http://www.pri.org/stories/science/environment/global-violence-linked-to-severe-weather5064.html