GCP: Global Conciousness Project

Watching the news last week I heard about a project called the GCP: Global Concisouness Project.  This project has hypothesized that there is a global concious awareness that can be detected.  How do they detect this global conciousness?  They monitor random number generators.

The random number generators (aka RNG) are on volunteer computers located throughout the world. The RNG devices simply generate randomly a 1 or a 0, 200 times per second.  Imagine if you will an automatic coin-flipper that gives a heads or tails value, 1 or 0 value.  Those randomly generated values are uploaded to a central computer where it is processed.  There are RNG nodes all throughout the world and as millions of data are processed they look for anomalies.

Normally out of 100 coin flips they expect 50 to be 1 and 50 to be 0, an expected random output.  However, there are times when instead of 50/50 they will get 70/30 values from a majority of the nodes that are spread throughout the world.  This is the anomaly because instead of a single node failing to become random, a majority of the nodes behave mysteriously out of the expected random order.

So why these out-of-random anolmalies?  They conclude that after 5 years of data gathering, that these anomalies are related to world events in which a large group of people are singularly focused.  For example, the 2000 US Presidential Election, the 2001 Terrorist Attack on the World Trade Center, the 2004 Tsunami quake, etc.  For each of those major events they correlate it to a spike in the random generation of numbers, suggesting that a global conciousness is being detected by the RNGs.

Pretty interesting but there are far too many questions left unanswered.  One that comes to mind is that when these anomalies occur, so many world events are happening that you can easily associate that spike to any event of your choosing.  Another question that comes to my mind is that, true random numbers can mean a non 50/50 result set.  If the expectation of RNGs was always 50/50 then it would not longer be random but expected.  So my guess is that despite these apparent anomalies, they are the normal output of these RNG nodes throughout the world and these scientists are unfortunately being led to conclude something that isn’t really there such as a global conciousness. 

I’m no computer scientist but that’s my take on it.. I’m sure many others find this interesting.