Wolverine’s Blog

For a few years I was contemplating ideas about the future. Especially those that give some insights about predictability of future events. When I was working in a cryptocurrency company I was exposed and became interested in markets. I became hooked on the ideas of predicting the behavior of them. I learned a great deal about the game theory, stochastic processes and sparks of insight that launched me on a journey to gain more knowledge about the mechanics of markets and generally patterns that guide time series data analysis and predictability.

If you don’t know what time series data means, you can imagine for example temperature readings outside your home that you take note of systematically with specified period like a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, etc. You make measurements of the specific variable like temperature, pressure, solar irradiation, etc., every minute and then given enough data you can make some predictions about seasonality, periodic trends caused by seasons and average temperatures during day or night. After all you know that during winter months the temperature is most likely to be lower than during summer, at least in the northern hemisphere. So given enough data you can determine that average temperature will be fifteen to twenty degrees higher in July than in January.

Since then I was experimenting with different techniques to see if any of them yields some better odds than just pure random chance. Three years ago I have discovered something interesting that lead to me to develop some of the beliefs I hold currently and mostly assume are true with my limited understanding. But before I explain what idea exactly I had there’s a need for explanation of some things that allowed me to devise this idea that maybe very ineffectual, but might or might not lead to something great or at last spark of some discussion and possibly lead to some new discovery in the future.

I was always interested in physics, philosophy and the nature of consciousness. It’s fascinating for me to read and learn about new discoveries in physics, especially in the quantum mechanics realm and recent discoveries that hint that quantum effects might have a large effect on how our brains and consciousness works. In neuroscience there are some hints that our brains use quantum effects like tunneling and perhaps even quantum entanglement of particles that allow our brains and minds to function at all.

I have to admit that I am no expert in those topics. I am simply fascinated by them and I try to integrate this knowledge to my everyday life and beliefs. I like them grounded in solid science and always have a skeptical point of view, reinforced by different perspectives, opinions and new empirical evidence. However despite knowing that there will be new inputs that might change my view of some things, at any given time I can only devise hypothesis and try to verify them with the knowledge and evidence that I have. But I’m always willing to explore ideas that seem fringe or far out. I take a stance that if you limit yourself to what you already know and not try to poke those cracks in reality, you are essentially regressing, as the most motivating factor in ones life is novelty. And I always seek it and challenge my established views and opinions, to break down and shake my stable worldview. Honestly, despite experiencing much resistance from external and internal factors, it never turned out to be bad. It always lead me to new insights and ideas.

And this is fun. Exploring new things. Shaking off everything you thought to be true, to broaden your perceptions and question your reality. After all, even if truth is not pleasant, it is possibly the truth (not saying objective as I am not capable to determine if such thing even exists) so one has to accept it or live in a blissful ignorance.

So let’s talk for a while about mundane topic of signal processing and the Fourier Transform. I understood what Fourier Transform was, and that it allowed to decompose the raw signal into time frequency domain to show a spectrum of frequencies of the signal. When I first learned visually and intuitively that Fourier Transform is effectively the first mathematical machine that was invented I was absolutely astounded and honestly, blown away. Every signal could be decomposed into constituting frequencies of sine waves and show you exactly how much of each frequency component contributes to the overall signal. This however comes with one problem. Fourier Transform gives you accurate information about frequencies in the signal spectrum, but you have no way of pointing where exactly these frequencies occur within the signal.

Okay, so why is, you might ask. It comes down to some fundamental principles and physical laws that I see reoccurring time and time again in different physical and informational phenomena, that essentially boils down to Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Setting aside a little philosophical thought that the only thing in life and universe that is certain is uncertainty, we can say that when you try to measure a signal you have two variables: time of occurrence and frequency of constituting waves, sinuses or sub-signals. You can either have absolute certainty on one, but then not the other and vice versa.

There is of course a little hack that allows you to analyze the signal with increasing precision in both of these analysis domains. You can use this ingenious mathematical trick called wavelets to process signals, with different time and frequency resolution to produce not one dimensional frequency map, but a two dimensional heat map, that correlates time and frequency of the signal, so it’s easier to pinpoint exact frequency appearance within time domain.

However, this gives you only moderate clues about when, where and how the signal looks like. And most of all you are working on data that is already set in stone (already happened). This might give you some insights into how the signal will develop in the future and many times, if your model is working well, it might give you good hints about some predictions with regards to the signal developing in the future. But since most of the time series data is essentially a stochastic, random process, there’s a high degree of uncertainty for your predictions. That might be alleviated to some extent by seasonality and trend analysis, but essentially underneath you have to assume that time series data like the market is essentially a random walk and you can’t predict it with 100% certainty. You can only make some statistical assumptions which are better or worse.

So, what can you do about it? Well, I found a probable way out of this. So let’s think of the signal in the given time period. What can we say about it? We can probably try to average it to it’s constituent sinuses or base waves in the frequency domain. This is called the polynomial fitting. If you can assign a highly correlated wave (compound sinuses) to match and fit the signal then you can probably to high degree predict with ease the development of the polynomial function in the future. Of course this prediction will degrade with time, but for short-term predictions it should be fairly accurate.

Let me digress here a little bit, before I expand on this topic further. When I first thought about all these things, I encountered a concept of retro-causality. It appears in physics that many of the theories and physical tools we have at our disposal, are time-reversible. It’s a fact. Quantum mechanics and particle interactions could be simply visualized by Feynman Diagrams. And guess what? Within them we it’s normal to see particles interacting with other particles that supposedly go back in time. We have also already proofs that particle observation (measurement) results in establishing determination of a state of particle in the past with experiment of Delayed Quantum Eraser with entangled particles.

This is not yet proven or an established interpretation or even a theory in physics, but if you take a look at the philosophical concepts of eastern scholars, like that the only thing that matters is perpetual now, you can try to imagine what it would be like if not only past influenced your current state of being, but also the future events influence the past? I won’t go into much detail here as this is a broad topic to explore and it’s not my intention to do here, but consider this. What if your future self is influencing where you are going? What if there was a way to communicate information from now to your past? Or from your future to your present? Is it even possible?

Well, many physical processes work the same in both directions of time and the results hold consistent. Of course there’s entropy and as far as we know and anything that could travel backwards in time would be faster than light in essence, which we now think is nonphysical. But. There are hints that antimatter might be traveling backwards in time. And some other physical phenomena like quantum entanglement essentially breaks the cosmic speed limit of light speed as it’s a spooky action at a distance that happens instantly, not obeying the speed of light. Yes, we are fairly certain that these cannot convey any meaningful information, but it keeps you wondering, if there could be a way to determine the future from the signals originating from the future.

Given the strange nature of quantum interactions and deduction from Feynman Diagrams of particle interactions, might give you counter-intuitive results that indeed information could be carried over from the future to the present, just perhaps with a phase shift of the wave propagation from the point of origin of the signal to the past or your present.

Most physicist however think that retro-causality is non physical, but I wouldn’t dismiss it already as there are some clues that it might be realistic and true. We just don’t know yet.

So, given all this what I have said, is it possible to even predict the future of the essentially random stochastic process? Perhaps it’s not very elegant solution, but I think there is a way. At least to very high degree of probability. As the nature of the Universe, especially the quantum microscopic world is essentially random, how you could predict randomness? Seems impossible.

But on the small time scales, you might reach a fairly good degree of certainty by using the oldest and the most simple prediction algorithm. Brute force.

Let’s assume we have a signal consisting of variable that changes over time. We can use tools given to us by mathematics and physics to try to model the signal to make a high degree polynomial fit, utilizing also the Wavelet transform or Fourier transform to support our polynomial fitting of the signal to the function. This would allow us to model the probabilistic future outcomes of the polynomial fit for the signal at short time-scales. Of course this fitting would be very inefficient, but in theory if we define a vast array of functions to compare our polynomial fit of the signal, we should find a wave or a compound sines forming the signal that allows us to predict future signal behavior based on a rather simple equation. Of course this is inefficient, slow and as all brute force algorithms, computationally intensive, but in theory it should work on short time scales.

So, maybe this does not constitute a true retro-causal interaction, but in my opinion it is as close as we can get to predicting the signal that is essentially random at nature.

For all this to work there’s a concept of coherence of two waves. In physics and especially quantum mechanics coherence allows you to compare two waves in terms of their similarity to each other. Of course for this to work this algorithm would need a large set of functions, including those chaotic ones (exponent powers, etc.) and a lot of trial and error on basic and not so basic transformations, like scaling, translating and perhaps even rotating. And it has to work a vast search space for a finite time series period. It would be very inefficient as an algorithm, but it’s a start.

Intriguing as it is coherence and Fourier Transform gives some interesting clues about functions of the data that are non-stationary. Did you know that when you feed these with a chaotic function that is non-stationary, the overall slope of the frequency domain would reflect the time-dependent change of the function values? So there might lie a clue for predicting the coherence of a polynomial fit of the signal to the function of interest.

If you think about it, there’s nothing that can prevent such an algorithm to work and I have done tests with the code I have developed, to show that finding a coherence of polynomial fit of the signal to the baseline function is indeed possible. The hard part is of course finding a high-degree polynomial fit for the signal, but you could probably do away with a good approximation.

So, there you have it. It should be possible to predict future development of the signal, by trying to find coherence between it’s polynomial fit and a vast search space of transformed base functions. It would be inefficient, but it could find solutions to a good degree and with a lot of computing power it should be more than likely to beat the odds of random chance.

And one more food for thought. If you think about this mechanism, if it’s possible to take a peek at the future with a high degree of certainty, it gives you some philosophical entertainment about the nature of consciousness and reason. What if our consciousness is not only a product of the past, but also of the future? What if our consciousness can only really function with retro-causal information? What if the future influences ourselves as much as our past influences us? If consciousness incorporates this mechanism one way or another, even if we do it unconsciously, what would it mean for causality? Or perhaps that given the strange nature of some interpretations of quantum mechanics or the reality itself, it is essentially true, what would it mean for you to exist?

I’ll leave that up to you.

It’s always good to imagine the worst. If you can imagine the worst that can happen, then doing this process repeatedly builds up your shield and hardens yourself against fears if you are able to make the leap to the other side. Put yourself in a mirror. Be in your mind exactly what you despise and fear of. Imagine it, visualize it, process it, take a look at yourself from totally opposite perspective. If someone says you shouldn’t do something, but you can’t find any rationale behind this, except for disgust and repulsiveness, which by itself is mostly a product of conditioning and socialization, then it’s only fear of some possible penalty that prevents you from doing it.

But take it this way. If you are a truth seeker, it matters to you and your identity, then truth is the ultimate reason for your fulfillment, so much so that if prohibition starts to conflict with reason, when there’s mounting evidence there’s a logical conflict, you ought to feel like this prohibition has nothing to do with reason, but rather with prejudice. Lack of open discussion on some sensitive topic causes lack of dispute, lack of exchange of thoughts, opinions, ideas and most of all reasonable solutions. Plurality is important. It cannot be forgotten in the name of political correctness. Having only one side of discussion is straightforward totalitarian. Of course, there’s a question if tolerant society can tolerate the intolerant? But I’ll leave it up to a reader to figure it out.

You can see this prohibition yourself everywhere. In the media, when talking with friends, in your workplace, in your home. This prohibition covers almost every topic in your life. You have to do this and that, this way and this way only. Otherwise you are prohibited. You are prohibited to entertain some topics, explore far out ideas or even let your mind loose and do crazy things you had never dreamed of doing. Why? Because someone said you shouldn’t. Why? Because this and that. And then you as a reasonable person start to ask more specific questions. Like a three year old child: “but why? but why?” “Shut up you monster and go clean your room.”

But as a smart ass you are not going to be flushed down the toilet. So you take the questions deeper. You’ve already seen the cracks in the wall, so now it’s only a matter of time you will poke this wall and start seeing the cracks open wider and wider for you to see what’s the truth behind the wall. That’s what I like about science. Even thought we have some established theories, doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have better models and suppositions in the future. If significant, repeatable, reproducible signal that contradicts one of the established theories is found then nobody reasonable refutes this new find or lead based on prejudice and their own beliefs. Instead if the signal leads to an extension or a new theory itself, science will accept it as a new model as close to factual reality as possible.

It seems however when you deep dive into physics, the more you begin to understand the reality itself might not be what we were supposed to think it is. We can happily and ignorantly leave our whole lives living as what we perceived was real, but really was it? It turns out that our recent understanding of microscopic quantum interactions and developments of holographic principle and other outlandish interpretations of some physical theories, point to the fact that reality itself is not real. For me, such knowledge was and still is eye opening. I still am trying to merge bits and pieces of information to get the whole picture, which is probably a futile task, but there’s small non-zero probability it isn’t.

So here, in every line of the above paragraph lies a stack of Pandora’s boxes and another can of worms. Of course one can ponder upon this knowledge attained and available to us and invented by us and found by us over so many minds and discoveries linked in an intricate web of inter-dependencies. Life is improbable. Life has probability and it’s life span compared to the predicted and estimated lifetime of the universe so small it should be statistically impossible. And yet, here the quantum fluctuation that gave rise to false Boltzmann brain is writing this stuff as it was all real. So if this is all false, then why is it true? In philosophy you can take either a supernatural stance, a nihilist stance or and absurd one. Some great philosophers said that for the first two you either choose the intellectual death or spiritual one. So the only obvious choice is absurdist view of existence.

Of course there were some recent developments that try to reconcile the ever going dispute between determinism and in-determinism. However it seems that our understanding of true nature of reality is yet to be achieved and probably a long time in the future. But maybe I shouldn’t write we as it is me, who doesn’t have this knowledge. Perhaps everyone else has and are just playing games. That’s something I am probably unable to determine, so I set it aside as irrelevant. Since it’s a statistical impossibility to be above or below average, I’d assume that most of human population are similar to my level of understanding.

So let’s speculate a little bit about the reality from a very subjective and probably non-scientific point of view. However as I have written before, I don’t like prohibitions for their own sake.

First of all, there’s some clues in our physical theoretical calculations that we might indeed be living in a universe that is a hologram. This holographic principle gave rise to Simulation Hypothesis. Now, taking aside all discussion around this topic, is it possible that we live in such a simulation? We cannot yet conclude that we know the answer to this question, but there are many clues in physics that might suggest it is a good description of reality.

Let’s assume we live in simulation. By our limited view and analogy we can think about simulation running on some kind of computer or a computing machine. Besides philosophical questions that may arise like “who started the simulation, what is it running on, what is it’s purpose, etc.”, we can think about some universal constants like for example energy which changes in it’s form, but not in it’s quantity. So the universe has a constant pool of energy which by itself can be used to do the work. However, since we have entropy, the amount of useful work that can be done as time progresses is lower and lower.

So we could find an analogy between energy and available computing power. Let’s assume that the universe is a simulation running on unknown hardware. That would imply that the rules and projections of the Universe in this moment are governed by some kind of code, a program or something of similar purpose that enables the creation of a rich, vast and dynamic world, including simulating supposedly intelligent entities with an unprecedented scale. We also know that information is another form of energy and information itself has mass. We also know that nothing cannot exist, so because of the nature of the Universe something will always arise from nothing. Random quantum fluctuations can give rise to a whole new Universe.

So how can we prove that we are living in a simulation? There are many arguments for it, but let’s consider a thought experiment given those perhaps shaky assumptions.

Let’s suppose we somehow invent a process or a machine or an algorithm that operation of  would result in exceeding the total energy of the Universe, which would probably mean that the Universe would cease to exist. But as far as we know, the Universe prohibits actions occurring from inside of itself that will cause it to self destruct. Maybe with a notable exception of false vacuum, but that doesn’t really constitute a destruction of Universe, rather it’s reorganization to lower equilibrium state. So if we apply the Universe self-censorship principle that states that no action that results in the destruction of the Universe is allowed, the machine, algorithm or process that allows this destruction cannot exist and every attempt to build or invent such thing, will be already self-censored by the Universe and therefore impossible. So is it that we are in fact living in a simulation?

Let’s suppose that such a machine, process or algorithm was possible. Someone at some point in the Universes time will invent such doomsday device, sooner or later. That would mean that at some point such Universe would cease to exist. But if the Universe ceases to exist then why we are here? So perhaps nobody really invented this algorithm, the Universe is not eternal and doesn’t have self-censorship, so we are yet to experience the end of Universe. Of course this raises a whole lot of other questions like “would we even know it?”

On the other hand the possibility is that the Universe is eternal and has self-censorship. That needs a deeper thought about the nature of the Universe. If we as conscious beings are observing the Universe as part of it, does that mean that the Universe itself is looking and exploring itself through our eyes and experiences? Does the observer exists because of the Universe or the Universe because observer exists? Or maybe both are two aspects of the same? If observer ceases to exist does this mean the Universe ceases to exist? What does it even mean for the observer or the Universe to cease to exist? But if the Universe has those intrinsic properties that prevent it’s destruction from inside, then we must conclude that such machine, algorithm or process cannot exist in this Universe, as any attempts to create one will be wiped out or prevented by the Universe itself.

Take an analogy that is recognized as contradicting causality in physics of closed time-like curves of space time. We are not entirely sure, but we are almost certain that those space time structures are likely impossible as they would violate the conservation laws and causality. Physicists are fairly certain that the Universe doesn’t allow breaking some fundamental laws and therefore we can also extend this idea to a doomsday algorithm or process that will cause the destruction of the Universe. It is simply not allowed in this Universe.

To summarize, if a doomsday algorithm was allowed in the Universe, then the Universe at some point will cease to exist, but then if we assume the Universe is eternal (or when there’s nothing, something must occur from quantum fluctuations), it can’t be non-existing, as one evidence suggests that you are reading this. Therefore such an algorithm was already censored or any attempts at inventing such algorithm would be prevented by the Universe.

How the Universe may do this? If we take into account some of the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, such as many worlds or Copenhagen interpretation, and we assume the Universe is a simulation, then we can speculate that every observation causes branching of the timeline into a tree of possible histories. Some are more likely than others, but nonetheless, each and every possibility is evaluated this way. Consider that every such interaction that causes branching is somehow evaluated by the simulation hardware. Multiple parallel histories are concurrently evaluated by this simulation and when one of the branches are dying of because of for example a Universe destruction, it’s ghost, which is a timeline of bad choices is being reintegrated into your reality (main timeline) with positive results coming from negative test done on that branch of time.

Given that we are now considering two dimensions of time instead of one, that gives you some food for thought. How can you even imagine its manifestation in reality is beyond me. So, given all of this we can conclude that hypothetical doomsday algorithm results in paradox, which causes Universe to cease to exists. But if we consider that Universe itself, even if it had a beginning, is eternal and self-correcting by itself (which BTW string theory found some mathematical structures that resembles computer error correction codes in laws of physics!) then such doomsday algorithm will be censored by the Universe, therefore no such algorithm exists and may exist in the future. However, despite it didn’t exist in your timeline, doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist at some point in the past. It caused the Universe (or the other timeline) to cease to exist, therefore it was reintegrated into our timeline of Universe with negative result or was phase shifted. The negative result reinforces our stable timeline.

So, if no such doomsday algorithm can exist, does that mean that proves the simulation hypothesis? I’ll leave that up to you.

“`brew install –ignore-dependencies -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/062799b7a384eddc42be0dfbfd1b63e7127c4d7b/Formula/openssl.rb“`

I had to install Windows 7 virtual machine under KVM hypervisor running on Debian 6.0 host server. The goal was to use QCOW2 type file as virtual hard drive. I’m used to take advantage of available tools, so I have made QCOW2 file using:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 win7.qcow2 100G

Then I used virt-manager to setup libvirt/qemu file for the virtual machine. However it seems that virt-manager (at least the stock one from Debian stable) has problems with xml description files management. It doesn’t always properly set them up. So I have modified hard driver definition in /etc/libvirt/qemu/VM_NAME.xml by hand, changing bus type from ide to virtio, raw image to qcow2 and address type from drive to pci (this is required when using virtio driver). I have obtained an ISO image of Windows 7 Professional which I have attached to VM as IDE CDROM. So far, so good.

After restarting libvirt-bin I have launched installation of VM from virt-manager. Windows 7 setup started without any problems, but as soon as I got to drive partitioning the problems started to mount. I have downloaded VirtIO drivers from Red Hat as suggested by KVM website. I have attached drivers CD ISO to another IDE CDROM and restarted libvirt. After loading drivers in the partitioning step of Windows 7 setup, virtual drive appeared, I have created new partition, but Windows installer refused to proceed with installation saying something about “Windows will not be able to boot from this drive due to unexisting controller. Fuck you, I won’t allow you to proceed with installation” or such kind of crap.

The solution. Install on QCOW2 partition using ide bus type instead of virtio. Installation will take many hours, guaranteed. After installing, start the VM and allow it to configure everything on the first run. As soon as you see Start Menu appear, shutdown this VM immediately, so you wouldn’t have to wait until your death for Windows to install six million updates and even one more. Attach virtio CD ISO to your VM and also create additional small partition image that will use virtio bus. You can use virt-manager to do this, clicking on the VM and then in hardware setup/information tab choosing Add below the hardware list. Choose Storage, set driver type to VirtIO and create a small 1GB partition or so. Don’t care about QCOW2, it can be simple RAW image type. After doing this, start your Windows 7 virtual machine, wait until it loads and then do: Start -> right click on Computer -> Properties -> Hardware Manager. Find Unknown SCSI Controller, right click Install/Update Driver, find your VirtIO CD, go to Win7\amd64 (I’m assuming you have 64 bit virtual machine) and proceed. Windows should automatically find appropriate driver and you should see after a while that Unknown SCSI Controller is now RedHat VirtIO SCSI Controller. Also, under hard drives you should see VIRTIO IDE DRIVE – this is your new small partition. After this shutdown Windows 7 again.

Why we did this step you might wonder? Well. Windows 7 won’t let you install driver for non-existing hardware (or at least I don’t know how to do it), so we have to cheat and use a temporary decoy as a small virtio bus partition for Windows 7 to see it and install VirtIO SCSI Controller driver.

After this we can delete this temporary decoy partition and change our /etc/libvirt/qemu/MACHINE_NAME.xml file. We have to change our primary partition to use virtio bus instead of ide bus, and select appropriate address, usually type pci, domain 0x0000, bus 0x00, slot 0x06, function 0x0. If you have non standard setup look for all address tags and choose slot accordingly – usually if you have the highest number for slot on the same bus number somewhere in the file, add one and you’ll be fine. Just remember that you count in hex, i.e. if your highest slot number is 0x09 then you have to use 0x0a and not 0x10.

After doing this start your VM and there you go, Windows 7 will run much faster using paravirtualized VirtIO SCSI driver.