Thursday, October 18, 2007

The Algorithm Vs. The Unpredictable


$2.2 Million Grant Calls for Designing Computer Software to Predict the Unpredictable

You ever have one of “those ideas” which, later, someone else is able to make come to fruition? It happens to me all the time, and is one of the more frustrating things about my existence.

Years ago, while serving on active duty as an Air Security Officer I came up with the notion of how to win the lottery or predict the weather. They both could be manifest of the same theory. I hypothesized that an algorithm—or series thereof—could be devised with which to emulate the behavior of certain complex systems with discrete outcomes, eventually “catching up” with the behavior of the system and then outpacing it. Once the algorithm learned the dynamics of the system it could not only tell you what it was doing at this instant, but also it could predict what it would do.

This system could be applied to the lottery and meteorology, I speculated at the time. It’s been years since that thought had occurred to me, but when I read this article I realized that this had boundless opportunities in other fields.

In the post-September 11TH world we are faced with terrorists and unstable regions of the world that rival similar parts of history during the Cold War, but even more savage. The implications of a set of algorithms which could “predict the unpredictable” could revolutionize many, many areas of the world in which we live.

Something to think about.

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