From: Jonathan Davis (jonathan.davis@lineone.net)
Date: Fri Mar 08 2002 - 09:29:56 MST
http://www.alphagalileo.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=readRelease&Releaseid=8859
For further information, please contact:
Steve Heywood
University of Sunderland
steve.heywood@sunderland.ac.uk 0191 515 2691
Posted By: University of Sunderland
07 March 2002
keywords Computing, Social Sciences, Local UK
Professor makes sense of chaos
Research by a University of Sunderland psychologist has revealed that
one in four people may have a special gift for predicting uncertainties
like the weather.
Tests carried out by Professor Richard Heath, from the university's
Business School, also showed that this uncanny ability could possibly
extend to the financial markets.
During his research volunteers were shown temperature figures for the
previous eight days and were asked to predict the following four days.
The figures were generated on a computer. One set of numbers was part of
a "chaotic" series similar to real weather patterns, while the other set
was random. Random sequences are by nature unpredictable, whereas
chaotic sequences follow specific rules. However, they are very hard to
predict in practice.
Despite this, one in four volunteers predicted the right temperatures
for the next two days. The results amazed Prof Heath who, at present,
can offer no definite conclusions as to how this happened.
He says: "The results were quite unbelievable. We still have some work
to do to understand what is going on in these peoples' heads but the
results are very promising. We are not talking about people being
psychic. But if someone was to say that people can't predict the future
I would say I think they can.
"The prediction accuracy drops off over time, just as it seems to do in
weather forecasting. But the best people got the next day's temperature
correct 80pc of the time."
By building in checks Prof Heath excluded the possibility of people
seeing any obvious patterns in the numbers. In other words, they were
not able to cheat by assuming that "the weather tomorrow is likely to be
the same as the weather today".
Prof Heath is now planning studies to find out whether the skill is
related to personality type or to aspects of intelligence.
If the research helps to prove that some people are sensitive to chaos
patterns it could help financial institutions to identify people who
could do well as financial traders.
----------------
Regards
Jonathan
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