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)
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
Posted by: Ryan | November 09, 2009 at 02:57 PM