Popsim
I’ve always wanted to create a simulation of everything. Something that would take the placement of every atom in existence and predict what state will happen next. The question of its possibility borders on philosophical, but the idea still intrigues me.
The idea of creating computer simulations has always seemed ridiculous to me. There’s technically nothing the code can tell you that you can’t already figure out. Which is true… for very simple simulations. A good portion of the undergraduate curriculum at A&M is doing its best to describe emergent properties of systems, things that can be predicted but aren’t really obvious given the behavioral descriptions of the components. The idea that they are hinting at is software bugs, but emergent properties pop up everywhere you’d last expect them.
I have a book in my hand that has some researchers from Los Almos doing “agent based simulations” of the stock market. Nobody predicts the stock market, it just doesn’t lend itself to it. I think there are reasons for that. But when the Nasdaq decided to let people trade in cents rather than quarters of a dollar, the markets shifted drastically. If you are a genius, you might be able to guess the result from the statement of the change. I am not.
What I’d like to do is to develop a rudimentary population simulator, precisely with the purpose of proving a point. This lends itself to horrible lying through statistics, but so be it. I’ll incorporate the typical distributions of crop yields per year, the probability of large and small outbreaks of disease, the impacts of medicine and technology of lifespan and production, mortality rates due to various causes as various ages, typical birth rates by year and their correlation, etc. A lot of this stuff will be an absolute crapshoot to get right. Some of it might be really easy to obtain. The extrapololation will be inaccurate at best, and might not even agree fully with historical data. But it should offer a framework for making rough predictions of the effects on various alterations to the human condition. Will an even distribution of wealth result in less starvation? Will caps on the number of children that a couple can have actually increase the quality of life of those already born? You could even investigate “Giver” scenarios. Who knows. It could be fun.
We have such an array of resources at our disposal, with more data being calculated, created, and archived now than ever. And this is a good thing. But without actually USING that data to make decisions, we get no benefit from its existence. It seems like companies are the only ones that take advantage of this potential, and I’d like to use it to optimize something more.
We’ll see how it works, or if it fizzes out. I have a lot of grand ideas, and very little physical evidence of past ones.