I am still trying to predict the future. It seems like this is taking me a long time. Am I bad at predicting the future? Am I secretly waiting until the future becomes the present so that I don’t have to predict it anymore? Or perhaps too much of my time is spent yelling at children who think that the excuse “It’s a dank meme from Reddit” is a good reason to post inappropriate content on our message boards. I should point out to these children that the Fields Medalist who used to post on our site when he was in high school did not post dank memes.

For now I have given up on predicting a numeric future. There are just so many numbers out there. How do we define a reasonable numerology of the future? It’s just so overwhelming, especially since I am forced to pick between a linear future and an exponential future. Won’t anyone think about the polynomials?

So the next plan is to move over to a classification problem: Do we have an elliptical future, a parabolic future, or a hyperbolic future?

Mostly what I’m doing here is trading in one set of challenges for another. The real issue here is that most of the past was parabolic. Most of the present in parabolic. I expect most of the future will be parabolic. So it’s hard to find a training set for the other shapes of futures.

I don’t worry too much about the hyperbolic futures; perturbing the plane so that we cut off a hyperbola instead of parabola is pretty well understood in the data. When I make the graphs, you can see the point where the past clearly revealed its hyperbolic nature; it shouldn’t be too hard to teach the computer how to see that. Or how to read that directly out of the database; these sorts of changes are controlled by the front end and logged in the change log.

It’s the elliptical futures that I worry about. Things are not elliptical very often, but when the future is going to be elliptical, it’s important to know about this as early as possible. The elliptical past is rare, but messy. Instead of using nice tools to set the eccentricity of the ellipse, someone changes cells directly in the live database. None of this is recorded in the change log; none of the original data remains. Everything is regenerated using the new values. The past has been erased.