Web Bot Forum Roundtable Discussion of Data Gap
As discussed, this month is when the web bots are predicted to hit the hard wall of the "data gap," or "discontinuity." To be clear, Clif High does not pretend to know what causes the data gap. But reports going back to some of the earliest web bot runs have shown that in this time period, the ability of the web bots to gather data would start to drop off dramatically and, over the course of about a year, disappear. Jules from Web Bot Forum posted an overview here.
Since the early years of the webbots, Clif High has seen a discontinuity or data gap in the webbots long term forecasting. As we get closer, the discontinuity has come into clear view starting in March 2012 yet for all intense [sic] and purposes, the discontinuity still remains a mystery. During this period the data grows holes which make forecasting impossible. Forecasting correctly and incorrectly is one thing, but what could happen that makes the data impossible to forecast?
Data gap is also something of a misnomer, according to High, who has more recently said that the reemergence of a small amount of data gathering capability was actually forecast due to a programming error. What we're actually looking at is a data stoppage.
Sorry, no. You misunderstand. Data gap is a 'natural' phenomenon. The recurrance of data after 5/2013 is the processing artifact.
The gap effect has already started in modelspace and simply is totally complete by 6.2013.
Also do not know what causes the gap. But at least now we know it is not a gap so much as a winding down and stoppage So unknown effects now are gradually (over 2011 into 2013) causing the stoppage of data. This *may* be good news in the sense that this pattern *would* fit a degradation of the internet.
clif