XPost: alt.ufo.reports

I realised some time back I had unwittingly written something like
Asimov's Three Laws into my s/w. One of its goals is to look for
(mostly) negative impacts on human being it can deduce from its
databases and tell me about it. Sometimes it notices e.g. across US
states that the variation of X is highly correlated with Y where Y is
a disease or something that impacts human welfare. It has a little
qualitative reasoning module to decide whether Y can have nasty
consequences for people if it goes too high or too low.

So this is the First Law.

Then of course the s/w does what I tell it. More or less. It's "AI"
s/w meaning it doesn't always do what you tell it and sometimes seems
to go out of its way to do the exact opposite. Mostly it does things
that are hard to understand so another thing I've set up in its little
list of things to keep in mind it to find models that are easy for
people to understand. It has a module for deciding "how
understandable" a given mathematical model is and it not only tries to
maximize the robustness of the model (making it likely to predict
something correctly even based on slightly different data or some
other point in time or space) but simple enough for an average Board
member to say "OK. Simple! Why are we paying this guy?".

So this is the Second Law.

At this point there is no embodiment of the Third Law. Don't tell the
robot rights people.

In its collection of interesting things it had discovered in the prev
24 hrs was a model for predicting (what else?) daily UFO sightings
from planetary position info. And under the "maximize obviousness"
instruction it came up with this:


REWEIGHTED LEAST SQUARES BASED ON THE LMS
*****************************************


VARIABLE COEFFICIENT STAND. ERROR T - VALUE P - VALUE
----------------------------------------------------------------------
date -1.41145 0.38456 -3.67027 0.00025
x1jupiter -0.00314 0.00035 -8.97156 0.00000
x2mars 0.00119 0.00025 4.72757 0.00000
x4neptune 251.64513 71.25143 3.53179 0.00042
x6saturn 1.28529 0.29924 4.29523 0.00002
x7uranus -13.62828 5.15489 -2.64376 0.00828
CONSTANT *********** 17717.24805 -3.56637 0.00037

WEIGHTED SUM OF SQUARES = 1608.67993
DEGREES OF FREEDOM = 1679
SCALE ESTIMATE = 0.97883
COEFFICIENT OF DETERMINATION (R SQUARED) = 0.14632
THE F-VALUE = 47.962 (WITH 6 AND 1679 DF) P - VALUE = 0.00000
THERE ARE 1686 POINTS WITH NON-ZERO WEIGHT.
AVERAGE WEIGHT = 0.96785


The model predicts daily UFO sightings based on the NUFORC numbers.
If course there is random noise -- a lot of random noise -- in the
NUFORC. Many entries are not submitted in the 24 hrs after a
sighting. If you look through the numbers it seems quit a few entries
come in months, years, and sometimes decades later. You always have
to wonder if someone waited 5y to report they saw something hovering
above their back yard do they get the date and time right. I suspect
many times "no".

The s/w wouldn't have left it for me if it weren't statistically
robust. The F-val and P-val for the model are high. Meaning there is
very little chance the pattern it found is due to luck. Other similar
data is highly expect to show the same pattern.

The coefficients are the interesting thing. They give the break-down
of UFO sightings related to the position of each planet. In this case
the position is the angle in degrees between a reference point and the
planet's position. All the planets here revolve anti-clockwise around
the sun when viewed from a position above the north pole.

Does any planet immediately stand out in the list and say
"secret UFO base here [flash flash flash]"?

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--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)