Game Theory predicts Russian President

Just reread an interesting article in Good Magazine about the chairman of NYU’s Department of Politics, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who uses game theory to predict future political and foreign policy events. Amazing!

Sure you’ve seen the explanation in A Beautiful Mind, but to briefly define game theory - it’s a branch of applied mathematics that defines how in strategic games, one’s dominant strategy which maximizes one’s return is based on the strategies of the other players. Thus, you base your actions on the actions of someone else, assuming he will act in the way that maximizes his own benefit. The classic example is the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Game theory can be applied to social situations, business situations, political events and foreign affairs. Bueno de Mesquita was hired by the Pentagon back in March 2004 following the alleged al-Qaeda bombing of a Madrid train three days prior to Spain’s general election. The US feared a similar attack on the US prior to the November ‘04 presidential elections and hired Bueno de Mesquita to run data through his forecasting model to tell them what to expect. “I said there would be no homeland attack. I also indicated that bin Laden’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, would resurface around Thanksgiving, 2004.” Just after the elections in November, Zawahiri released a new videotape.

Bueno de Mesquita has made over 2,000 accurate predictions ranging from terrorist threats to America to the peace process in Northern Ireland. Here are some of his other predictions..

  • Forecasted the second Intifada and the death of the Mideast peace process, two years before it happened.
  • Defied Russia specialists by predicting who would succeed Brezhnev. “The model identified Andropov, who nobody at the time even considered a possibility,” he says.
  • Predicted that Daniel Ortega and the Sandanistas would be voted out of office in Nicaragua, two years before it happened.
  • Four months before Tiananmen Square, said China’s hardliners would crack down harshly on dissidents.
  • Predicted France’s hair’s-breadth passage of the European Union’s Maastricht Treaty.
  • Predicted the exact implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between Britain and the IRA.
  • Predicted China’s reclaiming of Hong Kong and the exact manner the handover would take place, 12 years before it happened.

Wow!