"can predict details of the next 5-8 years of the life of its users"
Hell.. I can do that now,
For the next 5-8 years, this will be ~ 98% accurately true:
- Tomorrow, you will get out of bed
- You will eat breakfast
- You will drink
- If you are employed, there is a a greater than 71 % chance that you will go to work
- You will have a break and have lunch
- You will continue to work
- You will communicate with people
- You will leave work
- You will have dinner
- You will entertain your self for the rest of the day
- You will sleep at the end of the day
- At some point during this year you will be paid for your work
- At some point during this year you will pay taxes
=> Stick that in an algorithm, patent it as a time machine... I can predict with ~98% what you will do for the next 5-8 years
military confrontation with a foreign country, and forecast the fluctuation in the value of foreign currencies and oil prices by using his new invention
This has been around for a long while. Artificial Neural Networks have been trained to do this sort of thing for a long while, some very successfully
... You may have even paid for a trading forecaster , there are tones of them around, and they have been around for a while
... ANNs have also even been used to solve CAPTCHA (you can even find javascript ANNs)
... You can train them against Military simulators, to figure out the most likely outcomes
I've even written my own in c++, sadly the only time travelling that came out of it was moving forward in time at the same pace as everyone else
I'm not sure what he has done that's new, apart from label it "time machine"... In which case, I've also created a time machine with my points above
There is not enough information in that article, just tabloid hype... which boasts lots with and eye catching title without saying anything in detail at all