In their 4 July issue they had a piece that computer modellers have predicted that electronic stock trading could cause chaotic market swings if large numbers of computer program are allowed to decide which stocks to buy.
They draw an analogy with voting, and now report a claim by a physicist and a political scientist that the same thing happens in all group decisions: 'almost any voting rule gives you chaotic outcomes'. The paper by Meyer and Brown has been accepted by Physical Review Letters but is not published yet.
It gives a mathematical proof, that even if the preferences of a group of voters change only very slightly, the results will be completely unpredictable a few elections down the line. Such sensitivity to initial conditions is a defining feature of chaos [theory].
What is more interesting is how the existence of such proofs will shape the management of bourgeois democracy.
Business in Britain does not seem to be complaing about the costs of the 5,000 strong focus panel set up by Tony Blair to manage the subtleties of public opinion. It is rather similar to what big corporations try to do themselves.
Chris Burford
London.