The Man From The Future - John von Neumann (Audible Books)

I thought I knew something about John von Neumann, but this book amazed my by revealing how little I really knew about him at all. He was the definition of a Polymath .. and  a Nobel one at that, in many fields! So, hand on heart, I can thoroughly recommend this title (see below, I listened too it via Audible, but intend to buy the book too, so I can skim through the chapters again .. I cannot give a higher recommendation than that): 

A tantalising peek at its contents reveals: 

"The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann.

Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome."

It is also pitched at the general reader (so I didn't have that Stephen Hawkins Brief History of Time, "What does that mean?" - effect here on me).

Climate Change - World on Course for Dangerous Levels

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58600723

Anybody surprised?

RAND's Jason's predicted this back in the 1970's and it looks like they were right! 

Rand Report: Paths to Victory - Lessons from Modern Insurgencies

 https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR291z1.html

Academic Wargaming

PaxSims:
https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2019/08/05/wargaming-as-an-academic-discipline/

RAND YouTube Lecture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwa02IMRZ_k&feature=youtu.be

Sound Recording of Lecture:
https://soundcloud.com/warstudies/developing-an-academic-discipline-of-wargaming?in=warstudies/sets/kcl-wargaming-network

Fibonacci, The Delphic Method, RAND and a little bit of SCRUM

Looking through some old emails I discovered this little gem, shame on me though I had not marked the source: 

"Frequently there are great debates about the use of the Fibonacci sequence for estimating user stories. Estimation is at best a flawed tool but one that is necessary for planning work.

User story estimation is based on Department of Defense research in 1948 that developed the Delphi technique. The technique was classified until the 1960’s (there are dozens of papers on the topic at rand.org). Basically, the Rand researchers wanted to avoid the pressure towards group conformity that typically led to bad estimates. So they determined that estimates had to be done in secret. Initially, the estimates would be far apart because people had different perceptions of the problem so they would have them talk about highs and lows after estimating in secret, then estimate in secret again. At Rand Worldwide you can read the original papers that demonstrate convergence.

Rand researchers then studied the effect of the numbers estimators can choose and found a linear sequence gave worse estimates than an exponentially increasing set of numbers. There are some recent mathematical arguments for this for those interested. The question then--if you want the statistically provable best estimate--is what exponentially increasing series to use. The Fibonacci is almost, but not quite exponential and has the advantage that it is the growth pattern seen in all organic systems. Why does the Fibonacci sequence repeat in nature? So people are very familiar with it and use it constantly in choosing sizes of clothes. For example, tee shirt sizes are Fibonacci. Since some developers are averse to numbers (a really strange phenomenon for those working with computers) they can use tee shirt sizes and their estimates are easily translated to numbers.

Microsoft repeated this research in recent years in an award-winning IEEE paper. As a result, Microsoft has abandoned hourly estimation on projects. See Laurie Williams, Gabe Brown, Adam Meltzer, Nachiappan Nagappan (2012) *Scrum + Engineering Practices: Experiences of Three Microsoft Teams. *IEEE Best Industry Paper Award, 2011 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement.

So the Agile community has converged on the Fibonacci as the sequence to use. Unfortunately, many agile teams do not use it properly and try to get everyone to agree on one Fibonacci number which gives you mathematically and experientially provable bad estimates through forced group conformity. This is the very thing the Rand researchers invented the Delphi Technique to avoid.

Over and over again, researchers have shown that hourly estimates have very high error rates. This is true even if the user is an expert. It’s the tool that’s the problem. If you want to practice based on evidence, relative size estimates simply deliver a much more accurate estimate."

Does anybody recognise it?

Update: I was being lazy .. it is from Scrum Inc .. Googled the first paragraph and it found it, that's nice pattern matching and I should have done it straight away!
https://www.scruminc.com/why-do-we-use-fibonacci-numbers-to-estimate-user-stories/

FREE Matrix Game Resource: Chris Engle

From the father of Matrix Games comes a "free" resource:
https://sites.google.com/view/free-engle-matrix-games/home
Courtesy of this PaxSims post

Also see:
RAND: Duffers Domain
Defence of Duffers Drift

RAND looks at the uses of AI and then takes a long look at the chances of an accidental Nuclear War!

This is not a passing reference to Dr. Strangelove, in fact quite the opposite. In that film the humans were trying to de-escalate after an errant commander's psychosis unwittingly starts off a chain reaction of events that leads to nuclear Armageddon (sorry should have said "spoiler alert" before that). RAND's interpretation of risk is somewhat different and more frightening:

https://www.rand.org/blog/articles/2018/04/how-artificial-intelligence-could-increase-the-risk.html

Especially as "Deep Learning" is much more Black Box than the GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence) symbolic-based Expert Systems. As an old (and distinguished) AI Professor from Aberdeen University faculty once said of intelligent autonomous systems (in this case Air Traffic Control): "Yes very clever, but keep a (sensible) human in the loop please, that might be my flight you happen to be working with!" aka "Always watch the watchers!"