Modeling complexity w/ python (part 1)

The universe is complex. Everything around us (our weather, milk, yards, economy, etc...) operate under a veil of complexity. Humans have a long history of trying to tame this complexity beast.

"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand." -- Kurt Vonnegut

Arguably, the butterfly effect is complexity science's crowning achievement. Show me another complexity inspired movie starring man of science, Ashton Kutcher and i'll rethink that claim.

The butterfly effect is a simple idea. A butterfly fluttering her wings in Casablanca can effect the weather in Cleveland. This is an example used to make a larger point. Things are related in weird/crazy ways.

Perhaps everything is related! Here's what wikipedia has to say:

"The philosophical argument here would be that the big bang triggered every single action, and possibly mental thought, through the system of cause and effect."

"everything under the sun is in tune"

Also from the wikipedia article on determinism:

"Because of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, some deterministic models may appear to behave non-deterministically... Such considerations can motivate the consideration of a stochastic model even though the underlying system is governed by deterministic equations."

Even if we could measure and compute everything's influence on everything else, we'd still run into something akin to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In short, we need to embrace uncertainty!

Predicting the actions of humans

The stock market is a perfect forum for complexity analysis. The game is simple, predict the future better than your opponents and win a lots of money.

"Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations." -- John Maynard Keynes

This is the paper that got me interested in social network analysis: Twitter mood predicts the stock market.

No small feat! The financial industry spends a lot of money on methods to predict the future. A lot of money is really an understatement. How/why would twitter be good at predicting the market?

"Think of Twitter as a network of human sensors." -- Rick Lawrence, head of IBM's Machine Learning Group

Human social networks

Imagine all us crazy humans as a single, interconnected system. A lot of people have had this thought, you've probably heard the term 'the human super organism'.

Taken in aggregate, the human super organism is an amazing analytical machine. We experience, categorize, learn, and teach. In this way we gain collective knowledge over time.

"The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things." -- Robert Pirsig

Online social networks

The web lets us experience, categorize, learn, and teach w/ great speed and ease. We're still discovering what this means. Here are a few of many examples:

This is from a WSJ article on Virginia's magnitude 5.8 earthquake that hit last August :

Never have scientists had so much readily accessible, real-time data about what people say... Twitter texts are as timely as a pulse beat and, taken together, automatically compile the raw material of social history.

This is from the DARPA Social Media in Strategic Communication RFP :

Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social media sites and communities. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.

That's right, "Counter messaging". It's also about influence!

To be continued

OK, that sets the stage for implementation. Our next post will move from crazy theory to actual code.