The Deadlock

(Written: Jan 2005)


Sam sat staring at the screen. As the images of the report came to his mind it was getting harder to find the right words. The right words to put his findings in. The right tone in which to convey the message. Of course, there is no such thing as a right way of giving a bad news.

It had taken him quite some time to come to terms with what he had learnt. What was more shocking than the fact that the dead lock would come far sooner than expected was the thought that in spite of being warned two centuries in advance there was nothing that could be done to avoid going into the deadlock and once the world did go into it, it would be just that – a dead lock. A dead lock with only an infinitesimal probability of being broken before time would render it virtually unbreakable.

The theory of the dead lock had been around for quite some time though it was only a few scientists with offbeat interests who had heard about it. Most of them despised the idea altogether and the rest who did give it some serious thought did not have the luxury of quoting figures. Of fixing the event in time or even calculating the probability of its occurrence. The unspoken assumption was however that it would not happen in another thousand years. The world would have changed far too much for the deadlock if it did occur to be perceived. It simply wouldn’t mean the same thing in the new world as it meant in this. This was one of the two reasons the theory had failed to inspire thinkers to lose sleep over it. The other being the fact that it was far too inconceivable in the face of the developments in the scientific world. Every time a new theory was proven, every time a new drug was discovered, every time a rock in space was conquered the theory weakened. The blows were far too intense and frequent for it to not lose its credibility.

Sam, with just the right combination of degrees to put numbers into the theory, to calculate the correctness of the prediction had done just that. He wondered why no serious attempt had been made to do this. There probably were not many statisticians with a degree in psychology and an understanding of dynamic systems combined with the genius to translate the problem into a computer program.

The simulator fixed the deadlock at 2230 AD. With the calculation log displayed on screen there was no reason to doubt the correctness of the prediction.

‘Quantifying the amorphous’ was what Sam’s doctoral thesis was about. The ideas outlined had included ways of quantifying the parameters associated with the human mind. Learnability, innovation, imagination…words reduced to numbers. The rambling community of thinkers who had tried with little success to do the same gaped with disbelief at the simplicity of the idea on which the methods of quantification were based. All the qualities perceived, all the parameters that distinguished a human mind from the other were manifestations of the same process. The only thing that the brain really does is try to make sense. The process of making sense involved reconciling the perceived reality with models of things in the mind. Every thing that the brain perceives itself to be doing is but simply a subprocess – simply a trick for getting this done.

While defining the human mind was one thing, simulating the effects of interactions of billions of them was another. This was exactly what was required to be done to put some numbers into the dead lock theory.

Dynamic systems are touchy. Mathematically, a dynamic system is a set of entities capable of interacting with each other and influencing their states. The most important component of a dynamic system is time. It is time that decides the state of the system. When the core interactions and the rules that govern them can be deterministically defined the system becomes a deterministic dynamic system. The unobvious property of such a system is that its future is fixed. There is one and only one way for such a system to go and this is dictated by the rules that govern the core interactions. The reason they are touchy is that an infinitesimal change in the state of an entity has the potential to completely change the future of the system.

By quantifying the amorphous, Sam had pinned down the rules of interactions. The key to putting numbers into the dead lock theory however lay in the realms of statistics.

One would think that the bigger a dynamic system, the touchier it would be. But reality has strange ways of playing games with the mind and in this case it exposes a loophole as if to give us the power over such systems. The irony is that though the interactions at the entity level are simple and complexity only surfaces as the number of interactions increase, the systems become easier to tame as they get bigger. It becomes possible to describe the behavior of the system using rules independent of the rules that govern the core interactions. A fine example would be the rules of physics that describe the relation between the pressure, volume and temperature of gases. Gases with trillions of molecules heading in different directions and bouncing off each other are typical deterministic dynamic systems. While what is perceived to be pressure is nothing but the effect of molecules bouncing off the walls of the container and transferring their momentum thereof it is hardly believable that there exist rules that allow us to measure, predict and control such a thing. One can not look at the dial of a sensitive pressure sensor and help but wonder what gives us the ability of quantifying a parameter determined by the seemingly random movements of a trillion particles none of which would take our orders. Statistics. The ideas of statistics are what allow us to make statements about the behavior of large and complex systems. It does so by paying an essentially small price - certainty. While not many would realize, the rules that describe the pressure of a gas only tell us what is most probable – what is most likely to happen. This minor detail doesn’t really matter as long as we trust the pointer on the pressure sensor.

This idea was the back bone of Sam’s simulator. The idea of simulating the interactions of billions of human minds over a long period of time was far too inconceivable to others owing to the fact that they did not realize that if simple rules can quantify the pressure of a gas nothing should stop them from deriving parameters that reflect the state of the human race as a whole and framing rules that relate the values of such parameters to time. Such a rule would essentially predict the future of the human race.

Sam, of all people, knew that the conceptual distance between molecules trading momentum and minds exchanging ideas was too much to be bridged. The breakthrough however came while working on a relatively simpler problem of simulating the dynamics of a mob. Although it seems that the simulation of a mob would require an understanding of the responses of each of the members constituting the mob to the scenario as perceived by them which in turn requires a detailed understanding of each of their minds Sam realized that it is not really necessary to know any of these to come up with a faithful simulation. The conclusion was that only a tiny subset of the attributes of the mind determines the responses and that approximations of these attributes together with a simple curve describing the probable measures of these across the mob conclusively determine the outcome. The catch however was the margin of error. The so-called parameter space was dotted with critical points which demarcated the regions that produced the same results. As long as the parameters used for the simulation lie in the same region as the real point in the parameter space the results of the simulation would perfectly agree with the outcomes in the real world.

With the final piece of the puzzle in place all that was left was to trigger a simulation and sit back and watch as the Turing machine peered into the crystal ball and sealed the fate of the human race.

The deadlock theory would qualify to be the worst case of pessimism and easily win the abomination of the cult that prefers to see the glass as being half full. The rationalist however cannot dare to detest it. The theory in its simplest form was based on the fact that as our understanding of the world gets better, as more and more things get explained the growth of science slows down. There is nothing but cold logic in play. It didn’t take much for the Greeks to come up with the theory of the fundamental elements. The simple statement said that all that the universe was composed of was fire, earth, wind and water. More important than what it took to come up with the theory was what it took for the theory to stand. Again, nothing. It hardly faced any resistance. Any one in those days could come up with a theory that would stand. Stare at the night sky and see a hunter and lo you have your own theory – your own paper to publish. The fact that if two men can build a wall in two days four men can do the job in one appeals to common sense. There is no reason to treat advancement of science differently. The lesser the number of minds working towards it the slower the advancement would be. This is exactly what has been happening since the era of the basic elements. The reason is surprisingly simple. If someone has to contribute something to the understanding of the world he has to be aware of the advancements made and as more and more of this happens there are lesser men who are even aware of the advancements. It is like being born in a part of the explored world and setting off to explore the unexplored. One has to reach the edge of the explored world to even step into the unexplored and as more and more land is explored lesser men even reach the edges.

The theory simply stated that there was a non-zero probability of this explored world ceasing to widen.

The trouble with this problem of exploring land is that one cannot start at an edge. One has no choice but to start at the heart of the explored region and move towards the edge. Henn, who was the one who came up with the theory, said that once the radius of this region got longer than what one can trek in a lifetime it would cease to grow any longer. There however was an element of probability involved owing to the fact that the radius is trekked at different speeds. What is striking but unapparent is the fact that if the explored region fails to widen for a sufficiently long amount of time it gets harder to reach the edges and the race would go into a vicious circle.

The analogy was convincing enough but the theory sadly didn’t seem to have anything to do with reality at all. If the radius getting longer than what one could trek during a lifetime meant not being able to absorb enough knowledge so as to contribute something then this theory simply couldn’t have anything to do with the present or the near future. The average age at which thinkers make contributions is somewhere near 35 and with thousands of universities all over the civilized world bubbling with vibrant researchers the deadlock theory simply didn’t deserve anybody’s time.

Sam, however, knew better than to trust what met the eye. He was well aware of simulations that produced counter intuitive results only to reveal that a particular detail had more impact when simulated over time than what it appeared to have. Sam had his own reasons to carry out the simulation. The structure of the education system, the increased difficulty in getting a theory to agree with the ever increasing number of them and most importantly the role of chance. He had simulated a period of scientific inactivity once and was startled by the results. Such a period directly led to the deadlock. The only question that was left to be answered was whether this was around the corner or far beyond sight. A period of scientific inactivity is not as improbable it appears to be. If the hand full of big wigs of quantum physics had been killed during the Second World War we would have already had one in that field.

Sam had a sinking feeling as he stared at the result of the simulation, the so-called probability report. He wished he had never ventured into the unexplored terrain…