J. Doyne Farmer, an American complex systems scientist says the world is more predictable than we think, and he can prove it.
Already a subscriber?In 1976, J. Doyne Farmer walked into a casino in Las Vegas and committed a robbery. Nobody noticed him doing it: to anyone else it would have seemed as though the lanky 24-year-old was simply playing a little roulette. Casinos watch carefully for cheating at card tables, but the spinning roulette wheel is effectively a random number generator for which the only strategy was to take a lucky guess. Farmer had found a way to beat the odds.
It was not his first adventure at the edge of the law – as a student, he’d supplemented his income by digging a tunnel, more than 100 metres long, to smuggle motorbikes across the Mexican border – but the object was not to make money. Does Farmer believe in free will? He has been thinking about this a lot recently; getting divorced has prompted him to consider how much people are really to blame for their actions.We are, he tells me, shaped by the “constitutive luck” of genetics and experience, and as a physicist he recognises that the universe runs on deterministic laws, but this does not mean the future is set, because the universe is also chaotic.“Chaotic means that there’s limits to how much we can predict.
This he did want, from an early age. He grew up poor, in a household he describes as “troubled”, in Silver City, New Mexico.His parents moved to Peru when he was 14 and he went to live with his mentor, the physicist Tom Ingerson, whom he describes as “a genius, and a total non-comformist”; the book he spent the past decade writing and has just published,After college, Farmer was reading a biography of J Robert Oppenheimer when a poster bearing the great physicist’s name caught his eye.
In 1991, Farmer and his old friend Norman Harry Packard set up Prediction Company, which used their understanding of complexity to make predictions in financial markets.The company did proprietary trading, meaning it traded on behalf of a bank, using the bank’s money and while it was relatively small, its performance was outstanding.
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