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Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg figures there could be a formula that explains how people think. During a wide-ranging online question-and-answer session on his Facebook page Tuesday, Zuckerberg told famed physicist Stephen Hawking he would like to find that equation.
"I'm most interested in questions about people," Zuckerberg said in a written chat forum response to Hawking asking what big questions in science he would like to know the answers to. Zuckerberg responded with a list that included how the brain works and immortality.
"I'm also curious about whether there is a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships that governs the balance of who and what we all care about," Zuckerberg added. "I bet there is."
http://phys.org/news/2015-07-facebook-zuckerberg-figure-social-equation.html
Will Zuckerberg be a real life Hari Seldon ? Does SN think there can be a social equation ? If yes, can that equation be formulated in a way that can cater to all (or majority) of social relationships ?
Original Submission
(Score: 5, Insightful) by TGV on Thursday July 02 2015, @06:07AM
can think so simplistically. As a child, I looked at text in another language and thought that there must be some formula to change the letters so that they would form the same text in my native language. That's what Zuckerberg's idea sounds like,
Anyone who has studied a bit of AI or cognitive psychology will know that we haven't made much progress in modelling the human mind. We can imitate its performance by statistical training on our own data, yes, but there is no understanding. There also isn't enough data to build anything closely resembling normal human behavior. And even then, such a model would be an unreliable predictor of some optimized mean, not an individual model.