Play (Against?) God for Three Weeks

— by Jane Ren and Alok Batra

If you had all that power for three weeks, how would you use it?

On the one hand, you see thousands of residents in Ethiopia struggling to get access to clean water every day. On the other, you find garbage accumulating on the streets of India, causing pollution and illnesses. At the same time, those privileged Americans are just fretting about finding parking spots closest to their offices… How would you intervene?

What if you DO have that power to make a change?

Well, you do, as long as you can code. You can join to play these games by registering at this link.

 A few months ago, when TiE Silicon Valley and Atomiton had the idea of inviting developers to innovate on IoT, we decided this must be about making social impacts, not just about new gadgets, nor just about hacking.

Why god? 

Jon Bruner wrote on Forbes about the “god platform” for IoT, “the highest, most generalized layer of intelligence and user interface that ties together connected devices and web services”. 

When that number of connected things grows to 6.4 billion in 2016, it is not hard to imagine that we will need omniscient intelligence to orchestrate an extremely complex, interconnected system. 

The world problems were already complex: water access, waste disposal, city parking…. But the digital connectedness just made them hundreds of times more so by linking previously isolated pockets of events into a dancing landscape. Do you know that an average Indian citizen with a smart phone might be able to prevent sickness for hundreds of children, without even knowing this herself?

The challenge is, in three weeks’ of participation, how can a software developer have the “power” to influence events at this scale and generate impacts with this significance?

The answer is yes when we can “create” a world just like the real state of affairs, where we have thousands of residents walking in the community, deciding if they should or should not dump garbage on the streets. We have them making their decisions based on their friends’ influence and social awareness, and we have technologies such as sensors and apps to intervene. And that is exactly what you will get – a digital world with the Butterfly Effects of social affairs. The role of “running” such worlds will be given to the participants for 3 weeks, who will attempt to solve such problems with their ingenuity, creativity, even common sense, and of course, coding skills.

Why against god?

In order to change the status quo, we have to challenge it in previously unthought-of of ways. The hyper-connected world of people and things no longer runs on centralized rules. Decision-making in the age of social network and “things network” (IoT) will be distributed.

If a water well gets contaminated in Ethiopia, will citizens get sick or lose water access, or can you find a solution with distributed IoT technologies? Mobile water vendors serve water in African countries in a non-legalized market, but they are an important alternative source of water access. Is it better to ban them, or better to regulate them in a way that protects citizens? 

Why game?

This “game” is not the PlayStation you got your son for Christmas. It is the “game” that John Nash won his Nobel Prize for. It is based on the same principle as the “Game of Life” developed by John Conway.

Such mathematical and strategy games consist of multiple players, the information and actions available to each player at each decision point, and the payoffs following different decisions. Games are how our world runs. It determines how species evolve, and how international conflicts play out.

In this TiE competition, game dynamics will determine how many residents can get clean water access, how many citizens are willing to keep the streets clean, and how much revenue a parking operator can make in a competitive market. 

The games are about strategy – how you price your parking space will elicit responses from your opponent developers. 

The games are about evolution – how citizens dispose of garbage become increasingly a consequence of emergent group dynamics you can foster.

The games are about physics – how often you should service water wells is a factor of fluid dynamics and chemical encrustation.

By now, you may have guessed that such games we are using for this IoT event areagent-based models of complex systems, representing 21st century urban issues: waste management, water access, and city parking. They are created as model applications on Atomiton’s TQL platform. 

Why different?

Give whatever name you can think of to it. But it is not the hackathon your friends joined. It is not the IoT your colleagues have talked about. A few things are going to be very different:

1. Societies, not things

Things are not the end, but the means, even for the “Internet of Things”. In theWater Access game, you will find water pressure sensors, bacteria sensors and water meters, but they are only the means for you to discover the world behind them. In this world there are wells, standpipes as well as people such as household resellers and mobile water vendors. There are incidences such as water leakage, theft and contamination for you to fix. How can you intervene with a fixed amount of budget and achieve the maximum gain for the society – more clean water access for more citizens?

2. System, not data

 It should never be a static database with a set of APIs. The real world is a dynamic system of multiple actors, each influencing each other’s behaviors and payoffs. In the Waste Management game, you will get trash bin data from sensors and OBD data from your vehicles. But more importantly, how you influence some residents’ choices will cascade to their friends and fellow citizens. Isn’t the waste management job easier to handle if all your citizens stop dumping waste on the streets? That is a system problem, not a data problem to solve. 

3. Economics, not technology

Sometimes the technology can be fairly simple, the trick is how your customers make their decisions, rational or irrational. In the Parking game, sensors will update you on the parking occupancies. But it is really how you price the service, when you offer it, to whom you offer it, and how you compete with your fellow participants in the game that will determine your revenue. Same as in the real world – an IoT-enabled business is not equal to a successful business. Success is when IoT + economics. 

4. “Grass-root”, not top-down

In a final thought, I will add that such games could not have been created by any conventional software. The conventional top-down designs would have simply run out of capacity to deal with all possible scenarios and interactions. From the start we knew agent-based approach is required. Atomiton’s TQL is an IoT platform to support distributed logic between interconnected things – it became a perfect infrastructure for this type of systems.

Likewise, when you participate in this competition, remember that many secret solutions lie at the grass-root level. Each citizen is an “agent”. Not only do they make their own decisions, they may influence each other. And that is how we see the interconnected world of things and people is going to evolve.