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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
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One of the key ideas in The Shockwave Rider is the notion of a Delphi group, or Delphi pool. Read on for Brunner's explanation from the book.
Perhaps the most striking attempt to make use of this kind of idea was the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), a proposed futures exchange developed by our friends at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). PAM was intended to be a kind of "futures market" for the Middle East; investors could trade futures based on political outcomes in the region.
The idea is that the monetary value of a particular "future" (a stated outcome in Middle East politics) would tend to increase as the outcome became more likely. That is, the value of a futures issue would tend to reflect the relative likelihood of that future actually occurring.
Unfortunately, it turned out that PAM would allow trading in such events as coup d'etats and assassinations; the resulting uproar caused the cancellation of PAM.
The Delphi method was used in the late 1940's at the RAND Corporation. In their implementation, a panel of experts was regularly polled by a facilitator to predict future outcomes of events related to the Cold War. Brunner probably derives his Delphi pool idea from this work.
The name "Delphi pool" is derived from the pythia, or priestesses, of Delphi in ancient Greece. The pythia would take questions and make predictions (which modern-day geologists attribute to hydrocarbon gasses like ethylene, which bubbled up from the faults in the region).
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Science Fiction
Timeline
SpaceHopper Microgravity Robot Lands On Its Feet
'...a slender-legged tripod surmounted by a spherical body no larger than a football.'
Brin's 1990 Novel Earth Still Full Of Predictions
'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
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'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
Microsoft VASA-1 Creates Personal Video From A Photo
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
Splendid View Of Eclipse From Orbit Visualized And Repurposed By Arthur C. Clarke
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
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'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
SpaceX Wants A Moonbase Alpha
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
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