"Black Box" Seeing into the Future?

[InAJar]

http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649

Apparently, this "black box," a basic computer chip that generates random numbers foretold the 9/11 attacks and the Asian tsunami. I'm thinking BS, but does anyone know anything more about this? The fact that Princeton University researchers are backing it makes me question my own initial dounts, but it still seems hoaxy.

[Pavel]

If you look for a specific pattern you will find it everywhere if you look hard enough.

Before 9/11 there was no reason to look for 911.

I remember someone making a study where you would find futures told about 911, armageddon, e.t.c in moby dick and other books.

What about the events it did not predict? What about the events that it did predict and did not occur?

If I make a random number generator and let it run endlessly, I bet that "911 Crash" will generate sooner or later

As to be more related to the article, what precent of graph spikes resulted in world events? 1%? 25%? I am betting less then %.01 percent, its all a matter of chance. Having spurts of only 'ones' is nothing rare, just uncommon. Say the chance of getting a spike is 1 in 100000(example), and the chance of that spike hitting on a world event or some time around it (4 hours) could be 1 in a billion, and if this black box outputs a trillion numbers a day then it wouldnt be hard to hit on something like 911.

I belive that the machine outputted something right before 911, I also belive that it outputted a tons more time before 911 just because its a machine and nothing else :P

[liquid]

Oh not PEAR again :rolleyes:

[jfryejr]

Here's a very brief critique of the PEAR claims:

http://www.skepticreport.com/psychics/shapesintheclouds.htm

Somewhere--I thought it was at skepticreport.com--is a more in depth critique of their claims.

[Wallener]

It's nonsense. For starters, they used deterministic means to calculate "random" numbers.


Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

Looked at from the other side, no matter what sequence of numbers they had produced, they would have matched up with some major event because major events are happening somewhere all the time. That's why they print newspapers.

The question isn't "Why did this match up with [insert arbitrary event]?"; the question is "Why didn't this match up with more big events in that time frame?".