Cassandra Project

The Cassandra Project is a term of art used to describe an event prediction project funded by the CIA or other intelligence agency.

With the assistance of defecting Soviets and the CIA's own operatives, the initial phase of the project was to find and train individuals who possessed the ability of remote viewing. Progress was made, but this early project (Project Star Gate) was abandoned as too unpredictable.

The project was restarted at Los Alamos National Laboratory and shifted to mathematical model schemes and use of heuristics. Later, more computing power was added (using supercomputers) and finally using genetic programming along with some brilliant creativity the project was able to produce more accurate models.

The downsides of the project were the requirement of human input (butterfly effect), the prodigious need for information (IMINT), and the problem of the scale of the predictions – some modeling can predict only large movements of society (like the fictional psychohistory of Isaac Asimov), while others can produce specific outcomes but only for random events (see infinite monkey theorem).