Branch: Time - 1 Predictions

Hello, people!

You must be very busy right now, so I'll just wait until you come back in the next line.

I bet you're reading this line less then 3 seconds after you read the last one. Ha. I won. Or no.

So, today I'm going to tell some things I know about predicting events, and you may get confused or crazy. Just be aware of that fact. Oh, and what I say may not be accurate or it could be wrong, but that's the way I do it. If you have another way of thinking, tell me.

The first thing is the 'question' you make when you want to know about something in the future, like "what will happen if I don't go to work today?". With this question at hand, now we need to know about the current state, like "I'm at home, today isn't a holiday, my boss don't like people getting late to work", things like that. I call this part 'information'. It's when we gather what we know that could influence the outcome of an action, in this case going (or not) to work.

After that, comes the most complicated phase, the outcome. In a simple way, it could be "I'll get fired", and that would be just fine, you would go to work and that's it.

BUT. Let's make things complicated: you call your boss and give him a excuse. Let's call this "branch-one". So, we can divide this branch in three others, one with a lame excuse, one with a good excuse, and another with a perfect excuse. In the first, your boss don't believes you (and maybe no one would), so he still fires you. The second, he may confirm with another source about your excuse (expanding this branch, but whatever) and eventually deciding between firing you or no. The third is perfect (that means it may not exist at all), so he'll accept that and there's no problem.

And that I named 'branches', like the ones from trees, but in a abstract way. Every branch requires additional information about the current state, and maybe some info you don't have, making it not too accurate. But the main problems with branches are the additional branches, which appears when you want to take the prediction beyond.

That obviously take some time to think about, and that's when the 'time' variable comes in. In the go or not to work case, let's say you have 30 minutes to think about it. But let's say you are in a forest running from a tiger (when I wrote 'bear', I got a dejá vù, but let's keep that to another day) and you notice there's a child lost while you're running. So, the question: what you'll do? Run? Save the kid? Fight the bear? Surely you won't be able to think about all the results, so you take the best one and make it work out. It changes from person to person, but I would get the kid and continue to run like hell.

Hmmm... guess I covered a lot about predictions. So, just to fixate: first, comes the question (or question, it could be more than one, but that raises the complexity) and how much time you have to spend wondering about it. To actually predict about it, you need info and do the prediction in fact, calculating the results. However, there may be more than one possible result, and the branches enters in scene (each branch requiring more info and eventually adding more branches).

Thought that was all? Of course it's not. There's many more stuff to take into the calculation, but the most important what I call 'noise'. It's about occasional or random things that happens and you can't really predict completely, like an alien appearing in front of you (come on, it could happen). The effect is that we must calculate every one of them (impossible, just get the most likely) and create predictions that avoid or prevent that. This part gets kinda disturbing after some time, you can even go crazy after some time wondering about what could happen.

So, that's it for now. Maybe I'll write something else about this another time, but you won't need this. Forget this and be happy for it. Don't do like me and get crazy.

If you don't really care about your sanity, feel free to lose your mind. See you next time.

First Blood!

"Start with a blog". That was the idea a friend gave me when i was younger and had ideas to change the world. I won't say his name (Mateus - follow him), but back then, I realized the best way to change the world was by conquering it and decide about the other stuff after that. That was a long time ago, and I was thinking about it when I realized one thing: the blog must have a name.

You readers should know one thing: my skills at naming stuff are a total deception. No, it's not like you're thinking. It's worse. Let me explain: once I tried to name a game character. I spent almost one hour between "George" (my first name) and "AAA". It ended with "Geo". And some time later, I decided to reset the game and use the character original name, "Marche". From Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, if someone's wondering.

So, I was stuck at this stupid anti-naming mental block - for 4 years -, when I saw a tweet. A simple one. From the same friend I was talking about, and it was like this in english: "Jesus respawned, good morning, sinners". I thought that was a cool tweet. Still think it's cool.

Before this name, I came up with "press x to skip", but someone got it first. There was many others, but I'll just skip them, you readers will thank me someday for this.

Well, maybe this one could be interesting for some of you. See that image on the right side? It's Momoko, from The King of Fighters. Unlike the name suggests, it's a 2D fighting game, and that was the first character I ever played with in KOF (for short), and with her, I won a lot of fights - it's surprising what pressing random buttons could do. But that has nothing to do with anything.

Now, let me tell some things about me: people say I'm a nerd (not just people, but also tests about that), I like computers and programmation, I also like books (that means I read a lot) and games (that means I play videogames a lot) and I also don't like doing homework. Or attend classes. Study, in a general way.


So, that's it! My first post. I don't expect any reader for something like 12 years, so if you're reading this, comment. Don't make me track you down by your IP address, okay? So long, and thanks for all the fish!