PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

11. FORECASTING DESTINY
which would have appealed only to naive city planners—was that all
facilities are concentrated in the middle of the city. Another one was to
have facilities distributed at random throughout the city. The first case
gave an increase in energy spent of a factor of six; the second a factor of
fifteen over the actual configuration.
The city of Athens has been optimized naturally according to a simple
energy-saving principle. The overall structure is highly ordered and
scientifically describable but does not come in conflict with individual
free will. Every Athenian can buy bread at any bakery in town, but most
probably he or she will buy it at the nearest one. This is the key that
makes the system work.
Free will comes under a different light in another case of optimization,
the closed-circuit car race. Consider a Formula One closed-circuit
race. Without too much difficulty a scientifically minded person can
write a computer program to optimize the driver’s decisions during the
race. Among the data needed are the power of the car, the ratio of the
gears, the total weight, the coefficient of friction between wheels and
pavement, and the detailed circuit. Then some laws of physics must be
built in: centrifugal forces, accelerations, and the like. That done, a
printout can be produced that dictates the actions a driver must take to
cover seventy laps of the circuit in the shortest possible time. After the
race one may confront the winner with this action list and ask if he or
she carried them out. The winner will claim, of course, that he or she
was acting with free will but would have to agree that what is on the
paper represents what was done; otherwise the winner would not have
won.
Optimization reduces free choice. From the moment one chooses to
strive for the winning place there is not much freedom left. You must
follow the list of optimized course actions as closely as possible. Thus,
the winner’s actions and decisions are rather predictable, in contrast a
driver who may be accident-prone or a Sunday driver who may decide
to stop for an unpredictable reason such as observing a rare bird. Decisions
that can be predicted in timing, quality, and quantity are no longer
decisions; they are necessities dictated by the role assumed. If the racecar
driver wants to be a winner, his only real choice is the one of
making mistakes. There are many ways of making mistakes but only
one way for doing it right, and that one can be forecasted.
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