
Living Earth Simulator will simulate the entire world - evo_9
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/108025-living-earth-simulator-will-simulate-the-entire-world
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feral
I honestly don't know what to make of this. There are intelligent people
involved in it; I've attended talks by some of them.

Its not as crazy as the sensationalist article headline makes it out to be;
one excerpt from the "Project Outline" from <http://www.futurict.eu/> shows
this:

"Most importantly, the FuturICT project will NOT attempt to collect “all the
data in the world”, or to represent each individual on the globe by an
identical copy in some giant multi-agent simulation, considering private
features and preferences of all individuals. Science is the art of abstraction
and approximation. Just as maps do not show all the features of our
environment, a scientific model is specified such that a particular question
can be addressed in the simplest possible way. That is, models are to be
problem-specific, and parameters and variables not expected to be relevant for
the answer should be neglected."

I don't know much about the details of the specific project; but I think a
large degree of scepticism is healthy, when discussing any proposal to build
models with very large scope.

People have put a lot of effort into making economic models, but we still
aren't much good at predicting the kinds of phenomena that we are interested
in, such as the occurrence of crashes. It can be easy to model large scale
social phenomena; but modelling them _usefully_ is very hard.

It sounds _very_ ambitious; but then there are lots of smart people involved;
I don't know.

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colanderman
Interesting. Will the LES take into account its own existence (e.g. the change
in people's behavior when they are presented with LES predictions)? Of course,
doing so would either (a) make the problem undecidable (impossible to solve),
or (b) require calculation of fixpoints (very difficult to solve), or both.

The other alternatives are for LES results to be kept secret and used only for
policymaking, or for the results to be public and incorrect. I suspect the
former is most likely.

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gldalmaso
I wonder who's gonna develop this system and how will they manage it?
Sometimes even domains that appear simple end up reaching unexpected
complexity, and this Simulator is already set to handle enormous complexity
and massive data.

I can see the value in being an open source of cross-referenced data that
would then be digested by proper research. Though as a simulator, I'm not so
sure.

Not to mention the bugs. I doubt this complex undertaking will be bug free,
and being not so, can the outcome be reliable? Who will debug the
predications?

I think, as a rule, that we should not leave to computation what we ourselves
cannot fathom. If we had a grand understanding on human behavior, individual
and collective, then maybe this could be done, but how can we determine the
correctness of a program that does something we can't, right now, fully
comprehend?

I think there's much more value in trying to procure all this data in order to
enhance understanding of social behavior in face of historical data.

~~~
extension
I don't think it's a single simulation encompassing all the data. That would
be silly, as we obviously don't have a theory of "all social behavior given
all data".

Rather, it looks like a general research platform for social simulations. The
various models could be broad or narrow in scope, well proven or highly
speculative. Perhaps some models will also be built on the output of other
models. With all the models and all the data in one place, hopefully it would
start to become clear which are accurate.

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rwmj
A few years ago, I had an interesting job where I was on a team (of 2) that
wrote a simulation of the UK criminal justice system. Police, criminals,
courts, prisons, etc.

The idea was that the client could tweak various features (numbers of judges,
sentences for specific crimes, number of police on the beat) and look at
unexpected secondary effects this would have, like increased time in probation
or more prison overcrowding.

It was written in OCaml no less :-)

I wasn't involved in using the simulation that much, so I often wonder how
accurate and effective it was in the end.

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extension
Somewhat more detailed info here: <http://www.futurict.eu/the-
project/proposal>

Seems they want to wire up every realtime data source they can get their hands
on to a massive database, then allow researchers to upload apps to run on the
data. So, there would be a variety of simulations running, using different
models.

They would also provide access to the simulations at least to important
decision makers. It's not clear exactly how open the access would be.

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synnik
Asimov hashed through all this quite thoroughly in the Foundation series.

But it is always interesting when we catch up to classic sci-if and work
towards actual implementations of what was pure imagination only a short time
ago.

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tcarnell
...and its only a matter of time before the simulated world creates their own
simulation...

But I wonder how many simulations deep we are now???

~~~
3pt14159
This is an entire branch of philosophy.

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nyellin
It's interesting to note that the first automated simulator of real-world
processes was the water-powered MONIAC, built only 62 years ago. (MIT
Whirlwind, the first digital simulator, was finished two years later.)

Articles like this make me wonder if Eliezer Yudkowsky isn't so far off after
all. If I ever meet him or Aubrey de Grey, I'll apologize for not taking them
more seriously.

Edit: I messed up the links. Sorry.

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Freestyler_3
Let's hope that 1 billion does not give them access to the computer and/or
results of certain tests. 1 step closer to full in control government,
calculating just how much tax each person will pay without taking action
against governments. And much more like that. So I hope its used
scientifically and not for political gains.

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RyanMcGreal
Can we be far from creating the Total Perspective Vortex?

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YoukaiCountry
This sounds like a whole lot of pseudo-science to me.

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MoreMoschops
We're already living in one :)

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marshallp
This is pretty much what wall street does, except with a lot more than a
billion dollars of investment. That fact that it's not clear whether the data
will be made publicly available means it's just another scam on european
taxpayers.

