There is a remarkable claim in the "news" section of New Scientist this week, in a piece entitled "Predicting change, not a moment too soon". A piece in Physical Review E (which I don't have access to: ref DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.75.051125) claims that changes in the behaviour of swarms, crowds, traffic jams or similar systems can be predicted by monitoring a very small number of particles. "Using a mathematical model of a phase transition, they attempted to detect an oncoming change by monitoring only a small fraction of the elements in the system. They found that they could do so by focusing on the 'mutual information' shared by those elements. ...In a disordered state, looking at a particle gives no information about what others are doing. As the system approaches a phase transformation, the mutual information betwen particles increases, so that one particle's behaviour does provide information about the speed and trajectory of other particles. ... The researcher's simulations suggest that in a crowd of, say, 1000 people, observations on as few as five people might be sufficient."
I think it was George Gallup who suggested that it might be ultimately be possible to predict election results using five people. I'm not, sure, though, that I believe it. If anyone's in a position to appraise the technique it would be fascinating to know about it.
Paul Spicker
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