Did computer predict PM Charan Singh in 1979?
By Ria Sharma

The New Scientist magazine was launched in 1956 "for all those men and women who are interested in scientific discovery, and in its industrial, commercial and social consequences".  Today, the New Scientist website gets a staggering 3 million users every month.  Their magazine sells about 800,000 copies every month.

Technology and science help explain the mysteries of life, and its applications make our life easier. New Scientist,  like its peers,  has humanized its findings and research to reach out and share its knowledge with students and lay people.

New Scientist has just published an article on how Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, professor of politics at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California, used his proprietary computer system to predict Charan Singh’s rise to become the Prime Minister of India in 1979.

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A good opportunity arose when the US State Department asked his opinion about an ongoing political crisis in India. The ruling coalition had become unstable and it was clear that Prime Minister Morarji Desai would be forced to stand down and a new prime minister chosen from within the coalition.

Since his PhD thesis had been on Indian politics, and data on politics didn't seem a million miles from data on war, Bueno de Mesquita agreed to help. He compiled a list of all the people who would try to influence the appointment of the next prime minister, what their preference was and how much clout they had. He fed this information into his computer programme, asked it to predict how the negotiations would play out and left it to run overnight. His own hunch was that the deputy prime minister, Jagjivan Ram, would take over. Many other experts on Indian politics thought the same thing.

The following morning, he checked the computer and found to his surprise that it was predicting a politician called Chaudhary Charan Singh would be the next prime minister. It also predicted that he would be unable to build a working coalition and so would quickly fall.
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At that time the US Government did not believe the professor who claims an accuracy rate of 90 percent.  With all their recent policy blunders,  it seems that the American Government is still ignoring the good professor’s predictions.