'Web-bot project' makes prophecy of 2012 apocalypse

[Cricket]

'Web-bot project' makes prophecy of 2012 apocalypse

"Web-bot" technology has moved apocalyptic prophecy into the internet
age,
predicting that the world will end on 21 December 2012.

By Tom Chivers
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Conspiracy theorists on the web have claimed that the bots accurately
predicted
the September 11 attacks and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, and that
they say a
cataclysm of some sort will devastate the planet on 21 December, 2012.

The software, similar to the "spiders" that search engines use to
index web
pages, were originally developed in the 1990s to predict stock market
movements.

The bots crawl through relevant web pages, noting keywords and
examining the
text around them. The theory is that this gives an insight into the
"wisdom of
crowds", as the thoughts of thousands of people are aggregated.

However, the technology was later appropriated for another, more
controversial –
some say nonsensical – use: predicting the future.

Its study of "web chatter" is said to give advance warnings of
terrorist
attacks, and proponents claim that it successfully did so ahead of 11
September
2001. George Ure, one of two men behind the project, says that his
system
predicted a "world-changing event" in the 60 to 90 days after June
2001.

Despite the vagueness of this prediction, many believed it to be
genuine. Now
its makers claim that the technology can predict natural disasters,
and that it
foresaw the earthquake that triggered the 2004 tsunami, as well as
Hurricane
Katrina and the devastation that followed.

Its latest and most sweeping prediction is that 21 December 2012
signals the end
of the world, possibly through a "polar shift" – when the polarity of
the
Earth's magnetic field is reversed. Believers claim that as well as
the bots,
the 2012 apocalypse is predicted by the ancient Mayan calendar, the
Book of
Revelations, and the Chinese text I Ching.

Sceptics have pointed out several major flaws in the theory. First,
the internet
might plausibly reveal group knowledge about the stock market or,
conceivably,
terror attacks, as these are human-caused events. But, say critics, it
would be
no more capable of predicting a natural disaster than would a Google
search.

Second, the predictions are so vague as to be meaningless, allowing
believers to
fit facts to predictions after the event: a blogger at
dailycommonsense.com
compares them to Nostradamus's quatrains. They give the September 11
prediction
as a case in point.

Third, the prophecies become self-distorting. "The more people publish
about
2012 and the end of the world," says the same blogger, "the more data
web bots
get pointing towards 2012."

The polar shift theory is based on a genuine scientific theory,
"geomagnetic
reversal", which suggests the Earth's polarity shifts every few
hundred thousand
years. However, the theory in its current form is not reconcilable
with the
web-bot predictions of it taking place on a particular day in 2012:
best
estimates suggest each shift takes around 5,000 years to complete.