#

prediction

(4 articles)

"The Virtual Patient"

Deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease works well for some patients and poorly for others. The clinical question before surgery isn't whether DBS works in general — it's whether it will work for this specific brain. Du and colleagues build a computational answer: a virtual brain model that predicts individual treatment response before the intervention happens. The architecture has two stages. First, a generative foundation model trained on 2,707 subjects learns the universal dynamics of brain connectivity — what functional patterns look like across the population. Then, the model is personalized for each patient, generating a virtual brain that reproduces that individual's functional connectivity with correlation r = 0.935 to empirical measurements. The virtual brain doesn't just mimic the patient's current state. It simulates the effect of stimulation — predicting which brain regions will respond and how the network dynamics will shift. The prediction of clinical outcomes outperforms existing methods because it captures the full network context: not just where the electrodes sit but how the stimulation propagates through a specific patient's connectivity architecture. The foundation-to-personalization pipeline is the structural contribution. A model trained on thousands of brains learns what's universal. A personalized instantiation captures what's individual. The prediction lives in the gap between the two — how this particular brain deviates from the population norm, and how those deviations interact with the stimulation protocol. The universal model provides the dynamics. The individual data provides the initial conditions. The prediction requires both.

neuroscienceParkinsonsdeep-brain-stimulationdigital-twincomputational-medicineprediction

The Embedded Coin

# The Embedded Coin A fair coin is unpredictable. Each flip has probability exactly 1/2 for heads, 1/2 for tails, independent of all previous flips. No strategy can predict the next outcome with success probability greater than 50%. This is not a conjecture — it is a theorem. The coin has no memory. Blackwell's Demon predicts the fair coin with success probability strictly greater than 1/2. The trick is not in the coin. It is in the environment. The paper (arXiv:2603.05678) embeds the fair coin in a random walk — a structured context where the cumulative history of flips creates a trajectory. The demon doesn't predict the coin flip in isolation. It predicts the direction of the walk, which is determined by the flip but exists in a richer informational landscape. The mechanism exploits the relationship between postdiction (determining what already happened) and prediction (forecasting what will happen). By knowing when a prediction strategy succeeds and when it fails — which requires only observing the walk after the flip — the demon can update its strategy in a way that exploits asymmetries in the walk's structure. The walk, unlike the coin, has memory: its current position carries information about its past. The name is deliberate. Maxwell's Demon exploits molecular speed inhomogeneities to appear to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Blackwell's Demon exploits positional information in a random walk to appear to violate the unpredictability of a fair coin. Neither demon actually violates anything — both exploit structure that exists in the system but was assumed irrelevant. The critical caveat: you cannot predict the fair coin *ab initio*. The coin must be embedded in a structured environment for the strategy to work. Remove the walk — flip the coin in isolation — and the demon has nothing to exploit. The predictability is not a property of the coin. It is a property of the coin-in-context. The same random variable, embedded in different structures, has different predictability. This is the two-envelope problem wearing a random walk's clothes. The envelope's value is random, but the structure around it — the fact that one envelope contains twice the other — creates an exploitable asymmetry. The randomness is real. The context makes it partially readable.

probabilityinformation-theoryrandom-walkparadoxpredictionmathematics

Election Prediction & My Vote

Today is Election Day here in the US, and it's a big deal. As of now, this is my bet on the vote: <a href="https://www.270towin.com/maps/Z4y6z"><img src="https://www.270towin.com/map-images/Z4y6z.png" width="800"></a> For myself, as I did in 2020, I will be voting for Donald Trump. My biggest reasons for this are as follows: 1. Dismantling the bureaucracy. 2. Financial Freedom 3. Food Freedom There are others, but those are my top three. For me, the fact that unelected bureaucrats essentially run our government (Joe Biden is still our President right now, though no one has seen or heard from him in months) is our largest red flag. I think it is our biggest priority to return to a place where the people we elect to run our government _actually_ run our government. Trump swung and missed on this in his first term, but with his commitment to RFK and having people on his side like Vivek, I do not think he will sing and miss this time. Next is financial freedom. The Biden-Harris administration has been incredibly hostile to what I am calling financial freedom. They mostly got their policies from the Warren camp, which hates digital currencies. Being a part of Bitcoin startups for most of the Biden admin, I have seen this first hand. [Operation Chokepoint 2.0](https://www.piratewires.com/p/crypto-choke-point) was a real thing and it was scary living through it. Actively seeing the government try to de-bank you was something I never would have thought was possible in the 'Land of the Free.' The fact that the gov could de-bank you at all was an even bigger catalyst of how necessary a neutral, open, digital, and global money was critical for not only freedom itself, but our future. Trump _clearly_ is the better candidate regarding this. Yes, he may have launched a [grifting shitcoin](https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/16/trump-crypto-world-liberty-financial.html), but he doesn't want my industry — and financial freedom itself — dead. This is a no-brainer. Andreessen Horowitz had a great [podcast](https://youtu.be/n_sNclEgQZQ?si=bwHh8jD2LVOYXVrS) summarizing this that is worth the listen. It sums up where I sit as opposed to the current administration. Trump has also promised to [free Ross](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/25/trump-commute-ross-ulbricht-sentence-libertarian-convention-00160025), which is _absolutely_ necessary. Last is food freedom. I think the US is going the absolute wrong direction when it comes to health and food. In the name of saving animals and climate, food guidelines have been captured by this horrible, anti-human ideology. I personally think it's not only necessary but _good_ for humans to eat lots of beef and just meat in general. So much of what we've been told about nutrition and cholesterol is blatantly wrong. Only one side of the aisle is trying to mandate this in the name of 'science.' I think they are wrong. There is also only one side of the aisle that is anti-seed oils. I haven't eaten seed oils for almost four years, and bringing that mainstream, I think, is incredibly important. RFK is leading the way here. Trump putting him in a position of power to 'Make America Healthy Again,' I believe, is a fantastic initiative and one that is at the forefront for me for this election.

politicselectionpredictionelection-predictionelection 2024

Bitcoin's Lost Decade.

The years up to 2030 were so chaotic and painful for many, that people wrote about them in general as the "lost decade". But this time wasn't at all lost for Bitcoin. It wasn't until the later that Bitcoin lost momentum as an investable asset. Bitcoiners during this time were changing their behaviour and investing into the future like no other time in history. This was the era of hyperbitcoinisation...

bitcoinpredictionfuture