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."

If it is unpredictable...

[DragonWriter]

...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.

Didn't People Learn Anything from The Matrix?

[CodeBuster]

"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

Re:You don't need software for that

[I'm New Around Here]

Or ask people that aren't certified behaviorists or criminal profilers. Ask the kids who were picked on in school, whose embarassment and anger could only be contained behind a pleasant facade. Here's a case from my view.

In 1993, terrorists tried to destroy the World Trade Center by exploding a large truck-bomb in the basement parking garage. It did a lot of damage, but nothing severe. The government reacted by not allowing trucks in the parking garage anymore. To assure this, several large cement pylons and other traffic barriers were placed out front, and only cars and light trucks/SUVs were allowed through. Seemed like a good plan. Sorta.

My first thought after reading about these cement barriers was how could you drive trucks through these barriers to bomb the buildings again. You can't, they are too thick and reinforced. You have to go _over_ the barriers somehow. Can you drive the truck over the barrier? Not very likely. So how would you get the truck over the barrier and into the building? Put two wings on the damn thing and fly it in. In other words, rent a cargo plane, fill it full of explosives, and fly it into the buildings. In reality, the bastards were even more twisted than I would have been.

So now, would the computer be able to predict that outcome? Or could that predictions only come from a twisted brain that spent several years wanting to kill many people? Because that is exactly what we are facing. Unpredictable scenarios are only for people with no _personal issues_.

The Movie "Paycheck".....

[3seas]

...good movie with Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman.

Tell the future and then make it happen...

But then there is the quantum physics problem of changing the outcome by observing it.

At what point do you prove the software actually works in a manner that doesn't lend to the creation or alteration of what would have been had it not been predicted in the first place?

Oh I know, 2.2 million to produce software to predict the future but nobody is allowed to see the results.

Or this is where computer become smarter than humans by making humans not need to think for themselves...Hmmm, some already don't and they apparently have loads of money...

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I'm guessing...

[qzulla]

They never heard of the chaos theory.

  Deep Blue, the first computer program to beat a world chess champion, is an example of how ATRAP can respond to changing factors, Ten Eyck explained. "Every time its opponent made a move, Deep Blue recalculated all the possibilities and likely courses of action, eventually settling on the fittest move that would achieve its goal of winning the game."

However, chess is not an exact analogy because only two players are involved and the end goal is for one player to win.

In unstable areas, winning often means establishing an environment in which the factions co-exist in a win-win situation or at least in an equilibrium in which there are no rewards, and some penalties, for disturbing the status quo, Rozenblit said.

"Deep Blue is a good analogy because it illustrates the complexity of the problems, but in chess you have a finite court and a well-defined set of operations," Rozenblit added. "Therefore, a move constitutes a valid move.

But what we're dealing with now is a world with no rules, with infinite possibilities and moves that defy logic, such as total disregard for the basic instinct of self preservation."

Or maybe they have but are ignoring the fact it cannot be predicted. I like the last graf. It kind of says it all.

Oh well, good luck on that one.

qz

Re:computer?

[Jame_Retief]

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.

Re:Ridiculous

[dbIII]

Good point. The Brits lived in India, their kids grew up there, learned the language and knew what was going on. With a more more recent empire it's fly in, fly out, rely on whatever a translator says and try to work out from photos whatever is going on. There is also the increasingly common problem of things like fake intelligence scripted by a PR company getting mixed in with the real stuff (sixteen thousand plus WMD sites remember) and all the futile horror of people that think they will be murdered if they don't saying whatever they think the torturer wants to hear.

Re:computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's one prediction that is guaranteed to come true:

Government will continue to expand, both in revenue and power over the people, as history has demonstrated over and over again. The power elite at the top will continue to consolidate and centralize power, expanding the business of government and concentrating revenue and power in the hands of the few, just as they have since the dawn of organized coercion.

History shows that all governments expand in power and revenue throughout their lifetimes -- some faster than others, but governments only get bigger, never smaller. How do I know this? Because no government in history has ever significantly and permanently reduced its power or revenue through the process of democracy, and certainly not through the process of bureaucracy.

This is not something to overlook, some irrelevant detail -- this is a valuable insight into the true motives of the power elite who are in the business of government.

By the way, for all your attacks on the individual's natural human right (god-given if you prefer) to free will and self-ownership, you still haven't explained this: if man cannot be trusted with the ownership and government of his own body and mind, then how can he possibly be trusted with the ownership and government of others?