The opportunities for working with this are essentially limitless.
By HEATHER A. DAVIS
Ian Lustick
Charting the Future of the Middle East
On Ian Lusticks computer screen, masses of tiny multicolored squares represent thousands of people with different beliefs, economic status and ethnic backgrounds.
With a few deft keystrokes, Lustick makes events shift, causing the squares to change position. To the untrained eye, it looks like nothing more than green and red squares. Its actually much more.
These shifting color blocks represent changes in peoples attitudes, actions or identities, and the process of square manipulation is known as agent-based modeling. The technique enables Lustick and his colleague, Dan Miodownik, a Ph.D. candidate in political science, not only to see what global political hotspots are likely to erupt in strife, but also to track and analyze the hows and whys of the process.
The Middle Eastern politics expert helped to develop the user-friendly program and uses it in three ways: In very abstract maps about general political mechanisms; in maps that blend several countries together to form a composite area; and in maps that incorporate ethnographic and public database information to duplicate a specific place with a specific political system, such as his program, Virtual Pakistan.
Q. What exactly is a political cascade?
A. A cascade is a pattern of sudden and widespread transformation. Its a snowball effect, so it gathers steam as it moves. A political cascade, as an example, would be revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990. Why, in a particular period of time or in a particular country, does a demonstration that starts on Monday [end up with] more people in the streets, until the government is toppled within a couple of months? Thats a political cascade. Were interested in what determines the eruption of these cascades.
Q. How do you represent different interests and ethnic groups in programs such as Virtual Pakistan?
A. The colors represent particular identities. Its very complicated to make a map like this, but you get as much information as you can about how many of the workers in that rural area tend to have this but not that identity.
Q. How accurate are your predictions?
A. Were living in a world thats really one of many possible worlds. Its not that we can live in any world, its not that anything could happen. When you make a prediction, you really cant make a point predictionwhich of the worlds that are possible will you be in. You can just make a prediction about which world situations are more likely. And thats what we do.
Q. So how do you get to those predictions?
A. In order to get things as if history had been running for awhile we bias what identity the worlds currently telling someone to be. For example, is it relatively good to be red, relatively bad to be red? Zero is neutral. We can say okay, thats going to fluctuate randomly over time and every time we run it, there will be little differences. Those little differences could make a huge impact because of the complex way the world is organized. [Pointing to concentrated yellow dots] Its pretty well known that somewhere around there is where the nuclear materials are kept. What were really interested in is why did we get all the breakdowns here [points to virtual nuclear explosion]. My initial hypothesis was that when fundamentalism was strongerwhen this green color got very strongthat would be when youd be more likely to [have nuclear meltdown]. But that turned out not to be true. Theres almost no relationship between fundamentalist strength and this kind of disastrous outcome.
Q. So what would make that kind of disastrous outcome happen?
A. What we found was very interesting. In the transition [from civilian control to military control], thats where you get the high tension. A lot of people want to fix Pakistanits a disaster waiting to happenand they think the answer is a technocrat like [President of Pakistan Pervez] Musharraf who will expand the control of the civilian apparatus and democratize the state and replace the military. Pakistans best futures may actually be down that road. But what were suggesting is Pakistans worst futures are also likely to be down that road, because in the minority of cases when you actually do the things you need to do to fix Pakistanwhich is take power from the militaryyou lose control of key facilities. So then the policymaker has to wonder: Should we just allow Pakistan to go on simmering but not melting down, or should we try to fix it but then run a slightly higher risk of really bad things happening?
Q. Is there a practical application for this yet?
A. I have received mailings from military people in different parts of the country who experiment on Virtual Pakistan and develop their own stuff with it. I have no idea what they do with it, really. But I do know that other work that Ive done [on Middle East polity] did produce findings that went to decision-making levels [in the U.S.] and were combined with findings that were drawn from other kinds of sources. I can say that our predictions or advice was much more accurate than the advice or predictions that were chosen by these decision makers.
Q. What led you to this point?
A. In 1996, I became very interested in evolution and complexity theory, reading a book by Daniel Dennett called Darwins Dangerous Idea. It led me to believe that computers could be used to study problems in collective identity formation that were not able to be solved by normal methods. I found an undergraduate in this area who ... worked with me and created a toy model in JAVA, which worked but crashed constantly. A graduate student here at Penn in math, Vladimir Dergachev, said, This can be done much better. He was able to translate the theoretical requirements into a modeling system that does not require the user to be a programmer. And that distinguished what were doing from everyone else in the world.
Q. Will this change the field?
A. This is a technology that itself will cascade over the next 10 or 15 years because the number of problems that cant be effectively addressed with available standard tools is vast.
Q. What else can you use this program for?
A. The opportunities for working with this are essentially limitless. When I did a course last spring, we had people from psychology studying weapons control, studying chimpanzees. We did a public piece on bioterrorism on smallpox, on secessionism.
Q. Who else might theoretically be interested?
A. Advertisers would be very interested in this because its their dream to have a tip toward their particular product. Everybody just had to have one of the Cabbage Patch Dolls. There must be hundreds of these products that come out all the time, but once in a while, it cascades across the whole population of children. Why? Its very difficult to answer that question because its hard to experiment with large populations. When it happens in one situation, and it doesnt happen in another situation, you can usually find 14 things that are different. So how can you control all those variables? When you create a virtual world where agents are interacting with one another, you can control those variables so that only one at a time changes and see what makes the big difference in producing tipping or cascades.
Any Comments on "virtual Pakistan" do we need others to decide our destiny
By HEATHER A. DAVIS
Ian Lustick
Charting the Future of the Middle East
On Ian Lusticks computer screen, masses of tiny multicolored squares represent thousands of people with different beliefs, economic status and ethnic backgrounds.
With a few deft keystrokes, Lustick makes events shift, causing the squares to change position. To the untrained eye, it looks like nothing more than green and red squares. Its actually much more.
These shifting color blocks represent changes in peoples attitudes, actions or identities, and the process of square manipulation is known as agent-based modeling. The technique enables Lustick and his colleague, Dan Miodownik, a Ph.D. candidate in political science, not only to see what global political hotspots are likely to erupt in strife, but also to track and analyze the hows and whys of the process.
The Middle Eastern politics expert helped to develop the user-friendly program and uses it in three ways: In very abstract maps about general political mechanisms; in maps that blend several countries together to form a composite area; and in maps that incorporate ethnographic and public database information to duplicate a specific place with a specific political system, such as his program, Virtual Pakistan.
Q. What exactly is a political cascade?
A. A cascade is a pattern of sudden and widespread transformation. Its a snowball effect, so it gathers steam as it moves. A political cascade, as an example, would be revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 and 1990. Why, in a particular period of time or in a particular country, does a demonstration that starts on Monday [end up with] more people in the streets, until the government is toppled within a couple of months? Thats a political cascade. Were interested in what determines the eruption of these cascades.
Q. How do you represent different interests and ethnic groups in programs such as Virtual Pakistan?
A. The colors represent particular identities. Its very complicated to make a map like this, but you get as much information as you can about how many of the workers in that rural area tend to have this but not that identity.
Q. How accurate are your predictions?
A. Were living in a world thats really one of many possible worlds. Its not that we can live in any world, its not that anything could happen. When you make a prediction, you really cant make a point predictionwhich of the worlds that are possible will you be in. You can just make a prediction about which world situations are more likely. And thats what we do.
Q. So how do you get to those predictions?
A. In order to get things as if history had been running for awhile we bias what identity the worlds currently telling someone to be. For example, is it relatively good to be red, relatively bad to be red? Zero is neutral. We can say okay, thats going to fluctuate randomly over time and every time we run it, there will be little differences. Those little differences could make a huge impact because of the complex way the world is organized. [Pointing to concentrated yellow dots] Its pretty well known that somewhere around there is where the nuclear materials are kept. What were really interested in is why did we get all the breakdowns here [points to virtual nuclear explosion]. My initial hypothesis was that when fundamentalism was strongerwhen this green color got very strongthat would be when youd be more likely to [have nuclear meltdown]. But that turned out not to be true. Theres almost no relationship between fundamentalist strength and this kind of disastrous outcome.
Q. So what would make that kind of disastrous outcome happen?
A. What we found was very interesting. In the transition [from civilian control to military control], thats where you get the high tension. A lot of people want to fix Pakistanits a disaster waiting to happenand they think the answer is a technocrat like [President of Pakistan Pervez] Musharraf who will expand the control of the civilian apparatus and democratize the state and replace the military. Pakistans best futures may actually be down that road. But what were suggesting is Pakistans worst futures are also likely to be down that road, because in the minority of cases when you actually do the things you need to do to fix Pakistanwhich is take power from the militaryyou lose control of key facilities. So then the policymaker has to wonder: Should we just allow Pakistan to go on simmering but not melting down, or should we try to fix it but then run a slightly higher risk of really bad things happening?
Q. Is there a practical application for this yet?
A. I have received mailings from military people in different parts of the country who experiment on Virtual Pakistan and develop their own stuff with it. I have no idea what they do with it, really. But I do know that other work that Ive done [on Middle East polity] did produce findings that went to decision-making levels [in the U.S.] and were combined with findings that were drawn from other kinds of sources. I can say that our predictions or advice was much more accurate than the advice or predictions that were chosen by these decision makers.
Q. What led you to this point?
A. In 1996, I became very interested in evolution and complexity theory, reading a book by Daniel Dennett called Darwins Dangerous Idea. It led me to believe that computers could be used to study problems in collective identity formation that were not able to be solved by normal methods. I found an undergraduate in this area who ... worked with me and created a toy model in JAVA, which worked but crashed constantly. A graduate student here at Penn in math, Vladimir Dergachev, said, This can be done much better. He was able to translate the theoretical requirements into a modeling system that does not require the user to be a programmer. And that distinguished what were doing from everyone else in the world.
Q. Will this change the field?
A. This is a technology that itself will cascade over the next 10 or 15 years because the number of problems that cant be effectively addressed with available standard tools is vast.
Q. What else can you use this program for?
A. The opportunities for working with this are essentially limitless. When I did a course last spring, we had people from psychology studying weapons control, studying chimpanzees. We did a public piece on bioterrorism on smallpox, on secessionism.
Q. Who else might theoretically be interested?
A. Advertisers would be very interested in this because its their dream to have a tip toward their particular product. Everybody just had to have one of the Cabbage Patch Dolls. There must be hundreds of these products that come out all the time, but once in a while, it cascades across the whole population of children. Why? Its very difficult to answer that question because its hard to experiment with large populations. When it happens in one situation, and it doesnt happen in another situation, you can usually find 14 things that are different. So how can you control all those variables? When you create a virtual world where agents are interacting with one another, you can control those variables so that only one at a time changes and see what makes the big difference in producing tipping or cascades.
Any Comments on "virtual Pakistan" do we need others to decide our destiny
