Who is the most popular person on Facebook? Or perhaps I should ask, who will be the most popular person in 2014, five years from now. Her name is Lavette Johnson and she lives in Apple River Illinois. Or, so says Ajay Fordham-Day, of predictive analytics firm SynAp-Rilay.
How does he know? It is all mathematics. Specifically a new field of mathemetics called Analytics Prediction and Reliability Indexing Lens being pioneered at Cal-Tech in sunny Los Angeles, California. Professor Jo King, head of the mathemetics department explains:
We have all heard of the Butterfly Effect, which states that a butterfly flapping its wings could produce a tiny change in the atmosphere, and trigger a series of changes which could eventually lead to a hurricane on the other side of the world. This idea is at the core of chaotic systems and is the very basis of Analytics Prediction and Reliability Indexing Lens mathemetics. Given the right set of initial conditions, a series of simple algorithms can actually predict future events.Fordham-Day has taken this emerging field of mathematics into the business world with his Silicon Valley startup SynAp-Rilay, which aims to use the Butterfly Effect to solve real-world questions. He has developed a computer program based on A.P.R.I.L mathematics which he calls simply "F.001", short-hand for "Future to the 3rd decimal point." SynAp-Rilay has applied for over 100 patents for F.001, whose interface is impressively simple. With just a few clicks and a little bit of processing time on a standard desktop computer you can have the answer to just about any question you can imagine... if you set up the initial conditions correctly.
How and why did SynAp-Rilay pick Facebook to apply their new technology? Simple: Facebook has an incredible amount of data available and it is relatively easy to acquire using Facebook API's. He just plugged the initial conditions into the F.001 program, including lists of current users, numbers of friends and other data he could gather from profiles, waited two weeks for the answer, and out came Lavette Johnson, 42, barrista and aspiring writer, from Illinois.
Upon hearing the news of her future Facebook popularity miss Johnson exressed surprise. She only joined Facebook a few months ago and currently has 22 friends, but she says she enjoys Facebook a lot. F.001 predicts that Lavette will have over 1.5 million friends by March of 2014, which is a staggering number. Fordham-Day admits that this revelation may sound fantastic, but the F.001 program is rarely wrong, and he has checked the numbers himself. This prediction has a 99.994% confidence.Fordham-Day's company SynAp-Rilay has already signed agreements with a number of industry leaders to apply the F.001 program's smarts to other fields. Here is just a short list:
- Amazon.com - How would you like to know the best-selling products for Christmas 2013?
- State of California - F.001 is going to predict lottery numbers.
- American Idol - The program is going to predict 2009's winner.
- NFL Football - Who is going to win the Superbowl... for the next 5 years!
- NOAA - F.001 is going to test the actual Butterfly Effect and predict all hurricanes in 2009, including size, date and path.
Alexa has been given access to an early beta version of F.001 in an attempt to predict the most popular sites on the Web in 2014. Ajay Fordham-Day has personally invested over two weeks into this project along with a number of Alexa's top engineers. In order to get the initial conditions correct, F.001 required a massive dump of Alexa historical traffic data going back five years, plus a sampling of targeted crawl data over a terabyte in size. This data set is the largest ever compiled by F.001, and is expected to run for several more weeks. However some early information is coming out of the program and it has caught everybody by surprise. I don't want to spoil it here, so I will just say this: LOL Cats are going to be huge in 2014.
The future of SynAp Rilay F.001 is a bright one, and, based on my personal experience with the product I am sold. Stay tuned for our results, which should be made available by the end of April and will include not only the number one site on the web in 2014, but will also include Top 10 sites in all categories. You won't want to miss this.
