The Oil Drum: Finding Needles in a Haystack

In school, we used to do horrendously difficult mathematical “word” problems routinely. I remember occasionally getting one right, but more often ended up punting on the problem, and then waiting for the teacher to explain the solution in all its elegant simplicity. Of course, just about every real-world problem contains inherent ambiguities and incomplete information. So we rarely get to see the elegant solution in our day-to-day work life. Sometimes we get lucky and nail a problem, but in the majority of cases, we eventually resort to creating a limited model of the problem domain and deal with that.

The problem that I have recently wrestled with has to do with predicting future oil discoveries based on historical dynamics. Ideally, I want to reduce it to a solution that has the elegance of a word problem, and not have to deal with messy economic and geologic factors that would quickly turn it into a rat’s nest of complexity. Call me an optimist in this regard, but my intuition tells me that the solution remains as simple as … finding needles in a haystack.

The Oil Drum