> Asimov’s fictional future [in the Foundation series] didn’t need computers to predict its future—just geniuses, making magic with their formulas. The differe

> Asimov’s fictional future [in the Foundation series] didn’t need computers to predict its future—just geniuses, making magic with their formulas. The difference between Asimov and Simulmatics was that Asimov knew he was spinning a fantasy. People do not behave as predictably as billiard balls or water molecules. This so fundamentally misrepresents the Foundation series that it causes me to doubt the rest of the article. I realize that it's pretty tangential, but it's literally in a book. If the author doesn't get facts right when they can check them at their local library, it's hard for me to trust their accuracy when it comes to the genuinely hard stuff. Or, for that matter, forget checking their local library. Just reading to the end of the _summary_ of the Wikipedia article[0] would have gotten them this quote: > A key feature of Seldon's theory, which has proved influential in real-world social science,[3] is an uncertainty or incompleteness principle: if a population gains knowledge of its predicted behavior, its self-aware collective actions become unpredictable. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series