 In
last week's New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell describes the neural network
systems that have been designed, by two independent groups, to address
two complex commercial problems: predicting the success of a new
popular song, and predicting the success of a new movie. The article is
called The Formula.
Although
neural networks (collectors of massive amounts of data that then seek
'meaningful' patterns in that data that can be used to infer causality
or at least correlation) have been around for years, most students of
complex adaptive systems believe that complex problems (like global
poverty, global warming, or lack of innovation in big business) can
never be 'solved' because there are simply too many variables (perhaps
an infinite number) to allow any kind of exhaustive correlation or
useful predictive models to be built. The closest we can hope to get,
most complexity theorists would tell us, is interventions that would
have a positive impact.
The complex problems that Gladwell's subjects have addressed do have a lot
of variables -- the factors that determine popular opinion on a song or
movie are myriad and often seemingly unfathomable -- but the number of
variables is finite. What's more, the problem-solvers believed that, in
the matters they were concerned with, a reasonably small number of
variables (certainly a number manageable by today's computer systems)
were disproportionately responsible for a song or movie's success or
failure. And because we're talking about a product,
something that can be 'put in a box', the challenge of identifying
these variables is less problematic than the challenge of, say,
identifying all the variables needed to predict when and where the next
major hurricane or pandemic disease will hit.
One could say
there are complex problems and there are complex problems, and some are
more complex than others. Despite this, the designers of the 'expert
systems' that are now being used to predict song and movie success --
with remarkable precision -- faced ridicule and rejection from sponsors
and customers because of the prevailing belief that, when it comes to
predicting these things, as movie mogul William Goldman put it, "nobody
knows anything".
The key to neural network analysis, besides
the computing power to do a lot of iterations with a lot of variables
to look for patterns, is patience -- when the first few hundred
variables don't pan out, you set them aside and look at a few hundred
new ones, and keep adding until some pattern finally emerges.
The
variables used in the song success predictor involve the song's
structural components: melody, harmony, rhythm, beat, tempo, octave,
pitch, chord progression, cadence, sonic brilliance, frequency and so
on. The predictor, called Platinum Blue, has analyzed a huge number of
songs of many different genres and found the same patterns that
resonate with us in popular music can be found in classical and folk
music from all different eras. Popular songs, it finds, fall into
clusters -- the variables of those songs, taken in aggregate, exhibit
similar sets of patterns. The details, of course, are confidential.
If
a song falls outside these clusters, the designers of Platinum Blue can
tell you which variables need to be changed, and roughly in what way,
to get it back into the success strike zone, but beyond that it is up
to the artist -- how to
change the composition is beyond the capacity of the predictor. But
once the artist has made the changes, the predictor can tell whether
the result is within one of the clusters, and how much the changes mean
to the expected revenues from the song. The predictor's greatest claim
to fame is its prediction of enormous success for the CD "Come Away
With Me" by then-little-known Norah Jones.
What is most
remarkable about Platinum Blue is its wonderful vindication of the
talents of writers and composers: It predicts the success of the song
regardless of its lyrics or performer, based only on its compositional
qualities, its mathematical structure.
A different group,
Epagogix, has found the same thing applies to Hollywood film releases
-- the ultimate popularity and success of a film depends on the
qualities of its composition, not on the 'stars' attached to it who get
paid all the money. Plot lines, the ingredients of particular scenes,
characters, and settings matter. That's not to say that stars don't get
people into theatres, at least until word of mouth begins to prevail
over advance billing. But Epagogix can tell you that if the stars want
$40 million and the rest of the movie costs another $20 million,
whether the $60 million investment will be a winning or a losing one.
Epagogix
analyzed the 2005 movie The Interpreter, which went through several
massive and well-documented changes before it was finally released. It
concluded that the changes had made a probable $33 million film into a
$69 million film (within $4 million of the actual revenues), and then
pointed out the ways in which it could, with relatively few changes and
for very little additional investment, have become a $150 million-plus
blockbuster. Epagogix analyzed another (unidentified) film and
predicted would make $47 million as scripted and $72 million of three
minor changes were made -- the changes were not made and the film
grossed $50 million. If you've seen The Interpreter (I haven't) you can
probably assess better than I can whether the changes they proposed
would have made it a better film or not -- and the authors of both
Platinum Blue and Epigogix both assert that it's not enough to have the
right ingredients -- the product has to work artistically as a whole as
well, and no neural network system will tell you how to do that.
What
the neural network systems can't do is identify and parse the variables
to consider. That takes a combination of a knowledge of the art form,
and how it's appreciated by audiences, and also a great deal of
imagination, to keep honing and refining and trying new variables until
the ones that really matter start to emerge from the pattern matching.
This is in some ways as much an art as the writing and making of a song
or film itself.
The Wisdom of Crowds is another type of neural
network system, the difference being that the 'crowd' doesn't
explicitly identify the relevant variables it considers in rendering
its judgement. The point is that the group using that wisdom is
concerned with coming up with the 'right' answer (prediction, choice,
critical information etc.) and not overly concerned with how the crowd
came up with it. One WoC application, the Iowa Electronic Markets,
predicted that Bush would win the 2004 election while most of the other
expert predictors were saying Kerry would win. How did they know? Among
the crowd they had knowledge of thousands of subtle, unidentified
variables that individual experts could never know.
We would be
right to be skeptical of what we're told about Platinum Blue and
Epigogix. Despite what we're told about their success, there is enough
secretiveness about both projects that it is possible that both
products are hoaxes, or at least much less accurate than their authors
allege.
But suppose they are the real deal? What other complex
problems could similar neural network systems be applied to 'solve'? As
Gladwell points out, you could apply them to win at the racetrack, and
perhaps even in the stock market. You could probably use them to devise
the best possible new product design process. But could you use them to
analyze all the education programs in the world and come up with the
ideal curriculum for self-sufficiency and critical skills learning? Or
all the health systems in the world to design a hybrid system that
offered the best of all worlds? Or how about using them to develop a
revenue-neutral tax system that would actually change behaviours to
reduce greenhouse gases sufficient to end the threat of global warming?
I'm not so sure, even if neural networks could solve some
straightforward complex problems, that they're up to the challenge of
helping us grapple with the 'wicked' ones that have defeated us for
centuries, and which even threaten our civilization's demise. Even if
it were possible to employ them to such ends, it would take a great
deal of passion, patience, commitment and imagination to go along with
an astonishingly sophisticated and massive pattern-seeking technology.
But as one more tool in the Coping with Complexity toolkit, it sure couldn't hurt.
Image: NASA's depiction of the neural network of a single plant. |
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