I’ve had some doubts on The Global Consciousness Project over at Princeton. It’s a fascinating idea and could be pretty significant. Apparently, a multitude of personal computers are tossing random number around all over the world and sending the results to a central server. The results are correlated and compared against world events to determine if this kind of random number generation might show spikes of congruence thereby be a kind of world- event-predictor-apparatus.
Still with me?
See; apparently computers react to human beings, mine certainly does. When I want to type out a rant it blithely co-operates but I was referring to another kind of interaction.
Psychic interaction.
Well, OK, my computers(s) do tend to malfunction more when I’m in a bad mood. Do you think that might be proof of as sort of human-computer connection? I always put it down to making more operator errors when I’m in a bad mood but maybe – a machine with a brain that’s about as complex as a gnat’s. So what if it’s really just a machine, able to do only what we tell to do. Not intelligent by itself, it reads millions of lines of code to perform very complex tasks.
Human written code.
But I digress–most people seem to think computers are much smarter than they are. Or perhaps they think computers are much smarter than *they* are and reading some of the prattle out there I would tend to agree.
But one project had a computer flip random numbers endlessly. They saw a tiny correlation between an operator concentrating on the computer and the average random numbers that they generated.
OK so far?
So they decided to expand the experiment, using twenty odd PCs scattered all over the planet they started analyzing random numbers and found? PCs generate random numbers pretty much uniformly. That’s what the data shows. That’s not what the people at The Global Consciousness Project over at Princeton say however.
They say, “look! We saw a spike on 9-11!?
Well yes but that spike shows up on other days too.
“We saw a spike during the 2004 Tsunami!
That spike also shows up on days where nothing much is happening.
Claus Larsen writes a very illuminating interview with The Global Consciousness Project over at Princeton’s guru, Dean Radin. Larson thinks Mr. Radin is sincere but interview clearly underscores that he’s no longer doing science, he’s trying to prove a preconceived idea.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m very disappointed that The Global Consciousness Project over at Princeton has flat-lined. That it’s not making any significant predictions, that no correlation to human psychic interaction and world events can be seen. Just uniform random noise.
No really Regan! This disappoints the hell out me!
But facts are facts, if the data shows no correlation perhaps there is no correlation. In the very near future we can probably make a coordinated eqq project using millions of PCs, all shoveling random numbers back and fourth. I think it should be done. Berkley’s BOINC software might be ideal for such a thing (this is what SETI is running their shared processors on.) I would love to participate and have extra computing power standing by.
But I suspect Mr. Larson is correct when he writes–
“I don’t think he (Dean Radin.) appreciated it when I used the phrase “You are selecting your data”. It was the only time his brow was furrowed.
From the GCPoaP itself.
Here is a simple but beautiful rendition of the tapestry idea, programmed by Greg Nelson. It shows a recent five minute period of data, with the newest data on the right. The egg scores are shown as warm color dots (reds, yellows) for positive deviations and cool colors (blues, greens) for negative deviations. Horizontal rows (like the warp of a carpet) are the individual egg sequences, and successive vertical columns of color (the weft) are seconds. The egg array is mirrored around the horizontal centerline, which emphasizes patterns that may appear.