Comment by montagg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by montagg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Reads to me like Proto-psycho-history. Attempting to model behavior mathematically, with the assumption that all human behavior can be modeled this way, and that these models can be useful for predicting human behavior.

Saw an article a quarter century ago in The Atlantic about simple population models as a way to explain more complex behavior. One was: randomly distribute blue and red cells across a 2D grid. Every frame, pick a random cell: if it has at least one color like it nearby, leave it. If not, move it to a random location. Over many generations, segregated color formed. The article used this to describe something about segregated communities forming. I offer no opinion about the credibility of the article, but it was fascinating to me as a baby nerd, and seems at least a little related to this article’s line of thinking.

Once you understand how complex the human brain is, with 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses, formed over billions of years of evolution, comparing that to the machines we have built makes them seem silly and extremely simple in comparison.

Psycho-history is fiction. You're not going to be able to model a single human much less millions of humans and their environments.

> Psycho-history is fiction. You're not going to be able to model a single human much less millions of humans and their environments.

Of course it is fiction, but to be precise, within that fiction it was also stated that it's not possible to model a single human; the whole idea was that large societies of humans behave statistically in a predictable way, exactly because then non-predictability of any individual human becomes statistically irrelevant.

> Psycho-history is fiction. You're not going to be able to model a single human much less millions of humans and their environments.

Also it didn’t even work in the original fiction. If it did, there would be no story to tell.

I often wonder how much of the human brain is actually dealing with "thinking", by that I mean navigating, understanding complex systems, and what is there to keep you alive, walking and breathing.

The machine doesn't need this extra cruft.

Why do you think you need to do brain simulation to proxy human behavior?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com