Fac ut Vivas

At least one fictional device is slowly emerging from its sci-fi cocoon. This, of course,  is Isaac Asimov’s macguffin in his foundation series: the science of psychohistory. I arrived at this anticlimactic conclusion after finishing all three books (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation) this week. The choice of reading this particular series couldn’t have been more appropriate as I have been attending another iteration of complex systems classes since the start of the second semester to add to the few  already registered at my university transcript.

Complex systems, as I have understood it, is the study of systems demonstrating complex (duh!) behavior. Complexity is manifested in several ways:

a) individual agents interacting in simple (and often limited) ways yet, on the global scale (big picture), exhibiting emergent behavior that is quite dissociated from the behavior of a single agent, i.e. the whole greater than the sum of its parts

b) phase transitions, i.e. systems existing in one state then suddenly transitioning into another state as a response to an external stimuli, i.e. panic situations

c) having gnarly or chaotic behavior that is not random, fractals, economy, etc.

Of course, anything we can’t quite grasp can be considered complex.

There have been many systems analyzed these past years and the staggering diversity runs the whole gamut of man’s collective experience. Whereas, in the past, this field has been the province of a few bored mathematicians and underemployed physics researchers, it has gradually achieved a credibility that begs the question when the first nobel prizes will be awarded.

Sadly, if experience is anything to go by, it may not happen in the next decade as the next ten winners have already been predetermined by the test of time. The winners of today are those that survive the ravages and disappointments of their times, perhaps everyone of them not less than 50 years of age. Case in point: Prof. David Gross, a recent visitor at the university and the 2004 Nobel laureate in physics, had to stay alive (as the committee never award posthumously) for 30 years to get his.

But why our particular interest in this "new kind of science"? For one, we have loads of data. Not counting systems where human agents are involved, we have rain drops, snowfall, turbulence, liquid metal, and the whole enchilada, under scrutiny for quite some time. And not having anything interesting to say about it, is tantamount to a declaration that we have an awful amount of wasted hard drive space… Not to mention the usual addition to our wealth of scientific knowledge about nature and the universe we happen to let our wave functions contaminate.

Of course, study of systems involving humans take precedence because of even more pragmatic reasons: human activities involve energy, economics, and politics. Individual human activities are somewhat coupled to the activities of other humans. The spectra of the emergent phenomena initiated by these interactions ranges from force-knows-what to the more benign ones: love [1], for example.

But… back to Asimov:

The basis of psychohistory is the idea that, while the actions of a
particular individual could not be foreseen, the laws of statistics
could be applied to large groups of people and used to predict the
general flow of future events.

—- from www.wikipedia.org

While complex systems have yet to attain a kind of predictive power, in which the emergent behavior of these groups of people would be "exactly measurable" or "exactly defined" or would collapse into a recognizable trend (a general flow from the myriad or infinite possibilities), current studies are at best models and/or approximations of real phenomena. While we do have large sets of data, the actual processes that occur in  or out of the background are lost in the numbers that make up the terabytes.  Whereas in real panic situations, people cursing/dying/crying/praying/etc. are involved, in the model, only
velocities, trajectories, and clustering are preserved. It’s like having people play  football (the european type) and be more interested in the final score rather than the minute-by-minute breakdown of the game.

These lingering issues aside, complexity science, has gone far from its origins as mathematical games (e.g. Jon Conwoy’s Game of Life). Mathematical models are becoming serious considerations. Another case in point: our colleague Dr. May Lim has published an article in Science Magazine (www.sciencemag.org) last year, its subject, nothing less than the cultural violence occurring in borders (or disputed regions). The conclusions of that work have mitigated, what years of observations (data-gathering) have hitherto only hinted at.

One other thing interests us in this field. Complexity science is among the many studies that advocate an interdisciplinary approach. In the classical mode, a physicist working on cabalistic equations would have nothing to do with biologists, chemists, despite the fact that physics may indeed be everything (or not). However, as economics seems to suggest, the outcome depends directly or indirectly on the psychology of the participating agents, the mathematics (though, not overly complicated) of the transactions, and the ecological balance resulting from the transfer of people/money/ and goods. The modern breakthroughs in science and technology occur largely on the borders of disparate sciences: Ipods aren’t just marvelous feats of engineering (physics, electronics, etc.), it represents the next stage in the evolution of culture (study of culture?). By having all these Ipod users interact, we’d reach the next phase: social networking (sociology), and so on and so forth, each scientific field, adding a dimension to the picture.

Finally, what I remember from Asimov’s fiction is that for psychohistory to be useful, large numbers of people are involved. In his case, the population of the galactic empire, whose capital at Trantor alone, reaches 40 billion. We have only just begun and we haven’t reached our neighboring stars yet. With the virtual distance between each human becoming increasingly smaller, interaction inevitably occurs. We may not have to wait for complexity science to mature into a fullblown psychohistory. Even its present crude methods seems to suffice.

———-

[1] a shameless plug-in, in fact a reminder: it is the general mood that would occupy most people suddenly next week, no doubt. Itself, a complex system.