Applied Game Theory: Modern Analogue to Asimov’s Psychohistory?

Last weekend’s New York Times Magazine had an article, which I found fascinating: “Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?”  In it, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, reportedly one of the world’s most prominent applied game theorists claims to have calculated the answer.

Game theory assumes that people look out for what is good for them, (i.e. they act with rational self-interest) and de Mesquita then uses mathematical analysis to predict (very often correctly) such messy human events as war, political power shifts, Intifada.

Applied stats as a predictor of human events, I thought. Where have I heard that before?

Then it occurred to me that this was the premise behind Psychohistory as imagined by the great sci-fi writer, Isaac Asimov in his “Foundation Series”. “Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events.”

In Foundation, Hari Seldon, a Pyschohistorian, predicts the fall of the Galactic Empire, in much the same way as de Mesquita predicts the fall of the Iranian theocracy. (See the video on TED.com: “3 predictions of the future of Iran, and the math to back it up”)

Interestingly, at the end of the talk, Chris Andersen poses the question: “I got very nervous halfway through the talk, just panicking whether you had included in your model the possibility that putting this prediction out there might change the result?”

I wonder whether Chris was aware, when he posed the question, that by so doing, Bruno was violating one of the two axioms established by the fictional Seldon – “that the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses.”

Time will only tell.

That’s my .02!

Martin Suter

(martin.suter at iplicensing.net)

Comments

[Ryan]

Ah yes, but even Seldon violated these axioms himself, initially. By announcing to the Empire the impending doom he engineered the future to his liking. Perhaps, Bueno has taken into account these random variables and, in fact, is counting on them to engineer the future to his liking... duh duh duh