Newsgroups: alt.paranet.ufo,alt.ufo.reports
From: kymhorsell@gmail.com
Subject: prospects for offworld ufo bases

[uploaded 76 times; last 31/10/2024]

I realised some time back I had unwittingly written something like
Asimov's Three Laws into my s/w.  One of its goals is to look for
(mostly) negative impacts on human beings it can deduce from its
databases and tell me about it.  Sometimes it notices e.g. across US
states that the variation of X is highly correlated with Y where Y is
a disease or something that impacts human welfare. It has a little
qualitative reasoning module to decide whether Y can have nasty
consequences for people if it goes too high or too low.

So this is the First Law.

Then of course the s/w does what I tell it. More or less. It's "AI"
s/w meaning it doesn't always do what you tell it and sometimes seems
to go out of its way to do the exact opposite. Mostly it does things
that are hard to understand so another thing I've set up in its little
list of things to keep in mind is to find models that are easy for
people to understand. It has a module for deciding "how understandable"
a mathematical model is and it not only tries to maximize the robustness of
the model (making it likely to predict something correctly even based on
slightly different data or some other point in time or space) but simple
enough for an average Board member to say "OK. Simple! Why are we paying
this guy?".

So this is the Second Law.

At this point there is no embodiment of the Third Law. AFAIK.
Don't tell the robot rights people.

In today's collection of interesting things it had discovered in the prev
24 hrs was a model for predicting (what else?) daily UFO sightings
from planetary position data. And under the "maximize obviousness"
instruction it came up with this:


 REWEIGHTED LEAST SQUARES BASED ON THE LMS
 *****************************************


     VARIABLE     COEFFICIENT    STAND. ERROR     T - VALUE     P - VALUE
   ----------------------------------------------------------------------
         date        -1.41145         0.38456      -3.67027       0.00025
    x1jupiter        -0.00314         0.00035      -8.97156       0.00000
       x2mars         0.00119         0.00025       4.72757       0.00000
    x4neptune       251.64513        71.25143       3.53179       0.00042
     x6saturn         1.28529         0.29924       4.29523       0.00002
     x7uranus       -13.62828         5.15489      -2.64376       0.00828
     CONSTANT     ***********     17717.24805      -3.56637       0.00037

 WEIGHTED SUM OF SQUARES =      1608.67993
 DEGREES OF FREEDOM      =      1679
 SCALE ESTIMATE          =         0.97883
 COEFFICIENT OF DETERMINATION (R SQUARED) =        0.14632
 THE F-VALUE =       47.962 (WITH   6 AND 1679 DF)   P - VALUE = 0.00000
 THERE ARE  1686 POINTS WITH NON-ZERO WEIGHT.
 AVERAGE WEIGHT          =         0.96785


The model predicts daily UFO sightings based on the NUFORC numbers.
If course there is random noise -- a lot of random noise -- in the
NUFORC. Many entries are not submitted in the 24 hrs after a
sighting. If you look through the numbers it seems quit a few entries
come in months, years, and sometimes decades later.  You always have
to wonder if someone waited 5y to report they saw something hovering
above their back yard do they get the date and time right. I suspect
many times "no".

The s/w wouldn't have left it for me if it weren't statistically
robust. The F-val and P-val for the model are high. Meaning there is
very little chance the pattern it found is due to luck.  Other similar
data is highly expect to show the same pattern.

The coefficients are the interesting thing. They give the break-down
of UFO sightings related to the position of each planet.  In this case
the position is the angle in degrees between a reference point and the
planet's position. All the planets here revolve anti-clockwise around
the sun when viewed from a position above the north pole. All the angles
go from 0 through 360 at different rates and offsets for different planets.

Does any planet immediately stand out in the list and say
"secret UFO base here [flash flash flash]"?

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