Predictive Geometry

Chaos Theory. Self-Similarity. Fractal Geometry. Tessallations. Voronoi Diagrams. Penrose Tilings. Pentagram Maps. Projective Geometry. Computational Geometry. Discrete Mathematics. E8 Theory. Cellular Automata. Computational Universe. Mining. Spider Webs. Cloud Formation. Singer's Lock. Cold Reading. Magic Squares. Alchemy. Sir Isaac Newton. Richard Feynman. Stephen Wolfram. Walter Trump. Walter A. Roberts. Kate Jones (of Kadon Enterprises). Nathan Coppedge. TED Talks.

These subjects, singularly and collectively, have all inspired me to embark on an old quest to formulate a tool that can consistently predict random events that are generally free from human influence or where humans have gone to great lengths to preclude human influence. Think of lotteries and stock markets.

As a young boy in primary school I spent an inordinate amount of break time gazing at the formation of earth clouds, conjuring up shapes and images as the clouds coalesced and dispersed across the sky. This early fascination with predicting the next shape a moving cloud would form sowed the seed that is only beginning to germinate now.

Through this blog - and possibly a book, a game - I intend to nurture and share it until, hopefully, it bears fruit.

I came across the the aforementioned subjects at different times and for different reasons. However, the more I revisited them, the more it slowly dawned on me that geometry was the thread that bound them all. And at the root of them all, as is with all mathematics and science, is the human need to see, to discover, to extrapolate, to forecast, to predict, what comes next.

Geometry is probably the oldest form of mathematical reasoning. It is about shape and structure, about patterns and images, about perception and projection. Geometry is used to both abstract and make concrete our world. And it is not a trifle matter that the human brain thinks in patterns.

Is it then a bridge too far to revisit the foundations of geometry with a view of developing a tool that can predict random events?

Stephen Wolfram posed the following question - what if the solutions which we seek are already there in the computational universe? If they are, and human philosophy seems to suggest it, then all we have to do is build the tools to mine them instead of laboriously formulating equations to solve them.

Formulating equations is akin to creating a diamond in a lab instead of mining it. In fact this diamond analogy, using reverse logic, pretty sums up my argument. For hundreds of years alchemists knew that it was extremely hard but not impossible to create diamonds in the lab. Today, commercial enterprises exists that profitably do exactly that.

So it is with Stephen Wolfram’s postulate. I believe it is worth trying to mine for solutions instead of formulating equations to find answers to some of the intractable problems humans have faced such as illness and death; financial wellbeing and economic prosperity; politics and religion. And predicting the future is at the centre of all human endeavours.

Predictive geometry is the name I have given to the methods I am developing. The term predictive geometry is currently used in 3D mesh compression technology which, in turn, is used in data transmission, materials science and medicine.

To avoid an endless and fruitless quest, I am guided throughout by Richard Feynman’s Cargo Cult Science address given at a Caltech commencement.