Given that the English language has been with us (in more or less its present form) for around 600 years, and that the (near) future will STILL be capable of being described with english, I have devised a plan for knowing the future! Don’t laugh - this has some semblance of rationality! In brief, here it is:
-we localize an event in the future (that we want to know), say we want to know if there will be a war in the middle eas-we then make a list of all the engish words that might describe such a war (eg. israel, jordan, tanks, guns, aircraft, etc.)
-we then assign a ranking to each word, based on (its) frequency of use in english today. We can do this by scanning a newspaper article about the ME-if “Israel” appears 100 times, and Jordan 50 times, etc., we assign a rank of “1” to Israel, “2” for Jordan, etc.
Then we program a hyperfast super computer to make ALL POSSIBLE RANDOM combinations of these numbers, and also program the computer to REJECT (the 99.99 percent of the “gibberish” combinations.The ones we KEEP will be the future headlines.Please tell me I’m wrong-this sounds too easy!
Sounds like gibberish to me.
It would just be a combo of words, it wouldn’t be the truth or the future at all.
Maybe you could explain your rationality better, but i don’t get how any of it could possibly work.
I see three problems, at least.
- You’re getting into the whole “infinite number of monkeys” thing here. Some of your headlines might be correct, but only because you’ve predicted so many possibilities that a small fraction of them have to come true. Predicting a Middle East war might generate:
Israel, Jordan Declare War
Israel, Jordan Narrowly Avert War
Middle East Celebrates Peace on 100th Anniversary of Six-Day War
If you can tell me which of those things will happen, then you’re predicting the future.
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Filtering out the gibberish is not a trivial thing to do. Depending on when you do your word-frequency search, you might get something like “Britney Spears Bursts into Flame, Crashes into Elian Gonzalez”. That’s a grammatically sound headline, but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for it to happen. A sophisticated bogosity detector could help here, but you start getting into a gray area. Some things are possible, but damn unlikely. And where you set that gibberish threshold becomes your prediction of the future.
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In what sounds like an automated process to generate a prediction, you’ve already imposed your own expectation on it. You choose to predict a Middle East war because the tensions and history of that region make you think that such a thing might happen. If one of your predictions comes to pass, it’s because you chose a likely event, not because the process has any real accuracy.
Been at the cooking sherry again, eh? Well, I expect your prediction abilities to be at least as good as any other exercise in numerology. But you have to account for more than headlines. Suppose the General of an army is poised for an attack. Everything is perfect. The timing couldn’t be better. The enemy is in disarray. As he is preparing to give the order, he trips over a xylophone someone left in the room, breaks his neck and the war is lost. Unless you gave a high value rating to ‘xylophone’, your prediction will have been inaccurate.
Predicting the future is an interesting concept similar to trust. When you say you trust someone, what do you actually mean? Well, you probably mean you feel confident that you can predict the person’s actions in a given situation or circumstance by a better than even chance based upon your personal knowledge of how that person has acted in similar past situations. Usually this personal experience is based upon observations of a sufficient quantity and quality to establish, in your mind, the level of consistency you expect the person to demonstrate, and is thus a measure of the amount of trust you are willing to place in him or her. But what you are actually trying to do is predict the future.
Maybe you can, with some people some of the time. Because people are creatures of habit, and most of them are psychologically stable, reasonably honest, and capable of bearing responsibility. But insofar as predicting events with accuracy, no one has demonstrated such an ability on a consistent basis.
A person will always have the ability to choose, and may embark on a completely unforseen course of action or react in a totally unexpected manner through dishonesty, whim, caprice, or for no apparent reason at all in any given circumstance. Geophysical events may follow a previously discerned pattern, but are random and not predictable except in very general terms.
Still, situations that seem to defy explanation are common. People HAVE predicted specific events accurately. That would seem to be possible if spacetime curves back on itself and we are in a closed system. Or it could be simply a matter of chance. Out of about 4 billion people in the world at least some of them are going to have a dream about an airplane crashing or a volcano erupting.
I’d like to know but no tests yet devised have given definitive, repeatable results. I suppose we can test it ourselves. If anyone has the ability to do remote viewing, describe the view from my widow. Afterward, I will send a picture, or live video if you prefer. Or, you can put every word you can find together, give them a numerical value and predict what I am going to do tonight at 6:00pn.I can predict the future easier than that. Tomorrow, 100 people or more are going to read messages on this board.
You limit yourself far too much by assuming that what’s been important up to now will continue to be important… and that people/places/things that haven’t made the headlines before will continue to be irrelevant.
But in reality, it can take decades or centuries before a person or event’s importance becomes clear. Did anyone in 1500 think that Johannes Guttenberg was the most important man of his century? Do we even know the name of the Chinese inventor who first concocted gunpowder? Did anyone know in 1900 just how important Charles Babbage’s toys would turn out to be? In 1910, did ANYONE think a hapless band of Serbian terrorists would be of great importance? In 1976, did anyone know or care about some obscure, white-bearded Iranian holy man in Paris?
The important news stories of 2010 might very well involve countries we never think about, or people we’ve never heard of, or technologies we haven’t grasped the implications of yet.
You’d be predicting the future with a success rate of about one “hit” for every gagillion misses. Unimpressive to say the least.
Reminds me of a birthday card I saw once.
On the cover, it said: Inside! The winning numbers to next week’s lottery!
Inside the card it listed the numbers 1 to 50…
This is all very silly (in fact, I don’t even know why I’m bothering). However, the theory, such as it is, leaves out the possibility of new words and names arising. E.g., 20 years ago words such as “webpage” would have been a bit unusual to say the least.
That give’s me an idea . We get a large amount of chimps . Put them in a rooms with typewriters and … what it’s already been taught of ? Oh well back to the drawing board .
:: goes off looking for Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation for inspiration .
Thtwack!
what I am prposing is in a sense, a random number generation, with the numbers keyed to english words. It is true that looking at all random combinations would take an infinite amount of time. However, MOST of the “gibberish” combinations could be filtered out:
-you would only accet “headlines” froma specific year in the future (obviously headlines from 1899 would not be of interest!)
-you would only accept sequences that contained combinations of words (that match their frequency in modern english)
-the subject amtter would be screened for “nonsense” headines (like “britney spears crashes into elian gonzalez”
by application of these rules, the combinations could be reduced to num,bers that could be handled by a modern supercomputer.
You then could see all current possible “futures”; which could be tested. Say you asked for headlines from next week-print them and then compare them to what actually happens.
How much does it cost to lease a CRAY supercomputer for a few weeks?
Yes, we’re admitting the efficient gibberish-filter etc. It still doesn’t work, because there’s plenty of mutually contradictory things it would come up with… See Robot Arm’s examples:
Your program would return all of those, which is just as useless as returning none of them. We don’t need a computer program running for weeks on a Cray to tell us that there’ll be either peace or war in the Middle East.
Besides, what if Brittney Spears really does crash into Elian and burst into flame (heck, we can hope, can’t we)? You just said that that’d be one of the things filtered out by your program. Wouldn’t that be embarassing?
This just came over the newswire:
Britney Spears has Bursts into Flame and Crashed into Elian Gonzalez.
I guess some people CAN predict the future!
It’s a gift that everyone has, but some of us are just a little more full of it.
She did not burst into flames, I JUST got off the phone with Pierre Salinger’s brother-in-law who has seen secret documents kept by the CIA in a mayonaise jaw in the basement of The Alamo indicating that that she was hit with a Patriot missile in an effort to . . . Um. . . Well you’ll just have to wait for the Oliver Stone movie.
But back to the OP, you really don’t have to just do random combinations and weed out the giberish. Certain computer languages have “inference” engines, and can “predict” or at least “deduce” things logically. Take this simple Prolog program for instance:
likes(Bob,Jim).
likes(Lisa,Jim).
likes(Jim,Lisa).
If you ask “?-likes(Jim,Lisa)” it will answer “yes”. If you ask “?-likes(Jim,Bob)” it will say “no” because it can’t be proven from the rules. With enough rules, you can predict the future.
Or maybe not. But with enough rules, you could probably infer actions that are likely to occur. At least theoretically – we’re talking about a LOT of rules here. If you could get the computer to ask the questions it needs to know, and go on the internet and find out for itself, it would save a lot of monkeys from carpal turnel syndrome.