Prescience by Analysis

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that meddling Fantastic Four!

"If you look closely enough at the present you can find loose bits of the future just lying around."

— Petey, Schlock Mercenary

So, how does one predict what's about to happen when there's no Psychic Powers in the setting? With probability and statistics, that's how. From the results of the next sports game to the fate of the human race, anything can be predicted, as long as we have all the background data and include it in the right equations. You don't think so? Then behold The Big Board! Or even the Room Full of Crazy! There are all the equations! Oh, sure they look like gibberish for the untrained eye, but the math is there. The future can be predicted with 100% accuracy, except for that little detail we did not consider, and which ruined the whole equation.

Can involve Sherlock Scan or Awesomeness by Analysis. Often used by a Clock King. Sometimes used for a Precrime Arrest. Contrast Butterfly of Doom.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The backstory of The Orbital Children features an AI known as Seven, which made statistical predictions of the future known as the "Seven Poems." Seven predicted that Earth's population would be reduced by 36.79%, one of the factors leading to its deactivation. It later turned out to mean that they wouldn't die via a catastrophe, but leave Earth over the next several decades to live in space.

Comic Books

• Civil War (2006): Tony (main character of Iron Man) thinks that superheroes should be forced to work under government oversight; Captain Rogers (main character of Captain America) thinks that they should still be allowed to do what they think is right. All the other characters in the Marvel Universe have to take sides. Reed Richards supports Iron Man; his maths prove that lack of oversight would lead to several world-destroying disasters. This is explored even further in his own comic, Fantastic Four, in which Richards and the Mad Thinker compare notes. The Mad Thinker grants that Richards' equations are far more advanced than those he could come up with, but, as he had done himself in the past, Richards committed the grave mistake of ignoring the "human factor". By being so focused on his equations, he ignored the Invisible Woman's viewpoint, who then left him to join Cap's resistance.
• Fantastic Four: The Mad Thinker lives for this trope. It's basically his thing: use complex math to predict the results of his plans. That, and make mindless nigh-unstoppable robots.
• In The Incredible Hulk, The Incredible Hercules, and Totally Awesome Hulk, this is stated to be the "power/talent" of Amadeus Cho, the smartest kid in the world. He possesses a "hypermind" capable of making a seemingly endless number of calculations in his head within seconds, predicting what's going to happen. Visually, it appears as numbers and formulas floating in mid-air. Later, we learn that it runs in the family as his sister Maddie can do the same thing. In Chaos War, this is played with, as Cho and other super-intelligent characters accept that the Big Bad Mikaboshi is unbeatable, but Hercules refuses to accept it.
• Thomas Valiant has the Ostrich, who can calculate the odds of an event going to happen.
• Adrian Veidt of Watchmen is the "World's Smartest Man", and he's able to use his vast intellect to predict and anticipate changes in politics, society, culture, human psychology and by smart timing, such as publicly revealing his secret identity at a time of widespread distrust in superheroism, he is able to cultivate an image of respectability and goodwill that he uses to build an immensely successful corporation, whose resources he then taps into to unleash his devastating master-plan to save the world. He also anticipates that the strained international tensions will cause a baby boom from the accompanying increased sexualization of the media and advises his company to invest in childcare products.

Fan Works

• In Amazing Fantasy, Peter mentions that Reed Richards attempted this as part of his support for the Superhuman Registration Act. The problem was that it wasn't peer-reviewed and no one else could understand it but him, which destroys Reed's arguments when the SHRA was put on trial. He suffers a falling-out with Sue for months afterward.

Films — Live-Action

• π: Max Renn is a reclusive mathematician/numerologist who is trying to find the universal constant that will allow him to predict every pattern in nature. Specifically, a group of Wall Street bankers are funding his research to help them predict the stock market with perfect accuracy.
• In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, HYDRA's master plan involves preemptively executing everyone who could ever possibly be willing to rise up against their new world order. To do this, they created an advanced psychoanalysis algorithm to predict how each and every individual person in the world would most likely behave in the future, based on private information, social trends and internet habits. The result is a global hit-list stretching into the tens-of-millions, intended to be plugged into the targeting systems of Project Insight's hyper-precise helicarrier weapons.
  Jasper Sitwell: The 21st century is a digital book; Zola taught us how to read it. Your bank records, medical histories, voting patterns, e-mails, phone calls, your MSAT scores — Zola's algorithm evaluates peoples' past to predict the future.
• In Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Holmes has this as his trademark skill in combat situations. Before combat even begins, he can predict how a battle would play out to the exact mark thanks to him calculating the situation beforehand. In his confrontation with Moriarty at the end of the second film, it's revealed that Moriarty has the same ability.
• In Die Hard, Hans Gruber has studied every detail of the Nakatomi corporation in order to pull off, not only the perfect crime, but be able to fake his teams' death, by knowing every detail that is available on all the employees, even telling the boss, Joe Takagi, about his time in the internment camp during World War II. What becomes his undoing is that Holly Gennaro, Takagi's right-hand, was using her maiden name, and Gruber didn't know that her estranged husband would show up to the Christmas Eve office party.

Literature

By Creator

• Isaac Asimov:
  • All the Troubles of the World: The supercomputer Multivac is given full data on the entire Earth, including all of its citizens. It uses this information to predict the future actions of human beings; nearly eliminating crime, war, and poverty. There's proposals to expand the predictive analysis to include medical issues. Recently it has been given the responsibility to predict all crimes in advance so they can be prevented from occurring.
  • Foundation Series: Psychohistory, a set of mathematical models developed by Hari Seldon, is used to predict the future. There are certain restrictions on its ability to work as a form of prophecy: (1) Predictions can only be made for societies of a minimum size, although experts in the field have successfully wielded it on a scale as small as individual people. (2) The people whose actions are being predicted can't know what the prediction is. (3) That there would be no fundamental changes in human society over the next thousand years. Technology could advance, but not fundamentally alter the way human civilization functioned. (4) That human reaction to stimuli would remain constant. (This assumption was challenged in "The Mule", where the antagonist had a mutation giving him Emotion Control powers.) In addition, one more premise is deduced in Foundation and Earth: psychohistory only predicts human reactions, and alien/transhuman creatures are not predictable.
  • Franchise: Multivac has almost every datapoint it needs to predict how the citizens of America would vote in the election, and selects Muller to fill in the gaps of its predictive abilities, thereby negating the need for anyone to vote at all.
  • "Spell My Name with an S": Dr. Zebatinsky goes to a numerologist, who reveals that he isn't a Fortune Teller; he's a mathematician. Instead of analyzing the mystical significance of numbers, he uses computers, models, and statistical analysis to predict the future.
    Haround: Given enough data and a computer capable of sufficient number of operations in unit time, the future is predictable, at least in terms of probabilities.

By Work

• Mary Gentle's 1610: A Sundial in a Grave revolves around a form of mathematics that can predict future actions, with such precision that a mathematician with no sword-wielding aptitude is capable of winning a fight by predicting it several months in advance and then practicing the sequence of moves that will result in victory. One character turns out to be manipulating events because he's foreseen a catastrophe four hundred years in the future that can only be averted if he starts laying the groundwork now.
• In Avesta of Black and White, the strongest of the Dragvant, the side of evil, are the Seven Demon Lords. It is eventually revealed that the Seven Demon Lords are actually a result of a system imposed by Mithra to try and simulate and predict the archetypes of the future Hegemonic Gods of the Shinza verse. As their numbers indicate, she had planned for it to total at seven but as fans of the series know, things kinda went off the rails resulting in nine of them, possibly ten.
• The Nasuverse has two types of prescience, as detailed in the epilogue of The Garden of Sinners, one of which is essentially an ability to intuitively predict the most likely outcome of a particular chain of events based on all the minuscule clues and probabilities known by the "seer". Mikiya explains that this ability is not that different from how meteorologists predict weather.
• No Game No Life: Shiro is a Child Prodigy capable of high-level calculations. While her skills are useful in a lot of the games she and Sora compete together in, one of her greatest uses for it is in the realm of FPS games. After acquiring enough information, she can predict the movement and actions of her opponents to such an extent that to others she seems like she can see into the future. It's only when her opponents cheat that her calculations fail.
• In Small Favor, Captain Luccio of the Wardens reveals to Harry Dresden that most of the ancient Oracles at Delphi were actually previous hosts of the Archive, and their supposed prophecies were actually them using their vast knowledge to reason what the most likely future to happen was.
• The Culture has AI so powerful that they can predict most anything you're going to do. So much so that one AI records its conversation eight hours in advance.
• The title character of Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man is a stochastics expert who runs an agency that predicts the future (specifically, business risks and stock exchange rates) based on hard maths — but gives it up after meeting his mentor, who can actually see the future and teaches him the same.
• Worm:
  • Among the many abilities granted to the Number Man is the ability to predict the future through probability, which he can use in combat to predict the moves of his enemies before they make them.
  • Powers that involve future sight also act this way; no one can actually see the future, but their power can model the future (or possible futures, depending) with such precision and accuracy that it hardly matters.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In the episode "Spacetime", we meet an Inhuman who can make people see someone's death in the future just by touching them. Those futures can not be avoided (but they can be twisted). Leopold Fitz, resident genius, explains that predictions are mathematically possible.
• An early villain in Alphas has an intuitive understanding of cause and effect and can influence events, such as rolling a water bottle onto the road to create a massive traffic accident. Unfortunately, he can't understand that other people do things without calculating the end results, so he thinks that they're all plotting against him.
• In The Cape, Tracey Jerrod (a.k.a. Dice) has an innate understanding of quantum physics, allowing her to foresee the future to a high degree. Her father worked to map her brain in order to be able to duplicate the ability technologically. His research was stolen by Peter Fleming (a.k.a. Chess) and, eventually, released as T.R.A.C.E., a computer program that can predict things like the stock market with incredible accuracy. Neither Dice nor T.R.A.C.E. is infallible, though.
• In season 4 of The Flash (2014), Clifford DeVoe (a.k.a. the Thinker) gets super-intelligence as a result of the particle accelerator explosion (which he predicted). This gives him the unprecedented ability to calculate a myriad of possibilities for every action. He uses that to push Team Flash into doing things to his benefit. His only flaw is that he can't wrap his mind around human emotions and how they can affect behavior in unpredictable ways. At least one carefully laid plan goes awry when he fails to account for that.
• Milo in the Fringe episode "The Plateau" is a mentally handicapped man turned into a mathematical supergenius by an experimental drug. He goes on a killing spree against the doctors who want to wean him off, managing to do them in with Disaster Dominoes "accidents" that seem unconnected to him. His attempt to kill Olivia only fails because she's from "our" universe and therefore makes different decisions than people in his.
• NUMB3RS has Charlie use math to predict crimes before they can happen for the FBI in Los Angeles.
• The premise of Person of Interest is that a computer extrapolates from surveillance data who will be a threat to national security, and as a side effect predicts other violent crimes.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In "Statistical Probabilities", a group of genetically-enhanced savants are given access to secret war-related documents. They predict that the Dominion War will cost billions of lives, and to prevent such a loss of life they recommend that the Federation immediately surrender. Naturally, the Federation leaders do not accept the recommendation. They also predict that ultimately the Dominion will then be overthrown by a rebellion starting on Earth... but utterly fail to predict that the Dominion also predicted this and are planning to wipe out the planet, which the audience found out a few episodes previous in "Sacrifice of Angels". They try to force the issue by handing critical information over to the Dominion, but fail to predict that one of their own members would alert the authorities of the plan.

Tabletop Games

• The infamous LosTech Space Defense System from BattleTech had a component that could be installed in the larger drone units called the ATAC, short for Autonomous Tactical Analysis Computer, capable of millions of calculations per second. It allowed the robots to make predictive analysis of the battlefield, and made retaking Terra a real pain when Stephan Amaris took over the Terran Hedgemony and turned the SDS against the Star League.
• In Eclipse Phase, the psi-slight Predictive Boost temporarily amps up the Bayesian probability machine features of the brain.
• Monster of the Week: The Flake playbook has a special move called "Connect the Dots", which lets them figure out, among other things, where and when then next crucial plot event will take place from the minor in-game clues (out-of-character, this allows their player to flat-out ask the Game Master to reveal future plot details).

Theatre

• Be More Chill: The Squip instructs Jeremy to buy an Eminem shirt on the first day it's active. The following day, Eminem dies, causing several students to express symapthy towards Jeremy. The Squip explains that he didn't kill Eminem, just predicted that Eminem was statistically the most well-known celebrity to most likely die the following day.

Video Games

• The Big Bad of the Danganronpa franchise, Junko Enoshima, though they advertise themselves as being the Ultimate Fashionista (and, of course, Ultimate Despair), their actual talent is Ultimate Analyst. Their analytical ability is so great that they can basically predict the future (which is how she can be the Ultimate Fashionista, as she can predict what fashion trends are about to take off and get in on them early). This ability, however, has left them extremely bored with the world, since nothing comes as a surprise to them. This is what led them to become obsessed with the emotion of despair, as it is the one thing they found that makes people act in ways even they can't predict, and is therefore the only thing even remotely interesting or exciting to them. The second game has another example in Izuru Kamukura, who is this by virtue of having every single talent known to man and has fallen into a level of boredom rivaling even the Big Bad's.
• Fallout:
  • In Fallout 4, the Railroad has P.A.M., the Predictive Analytics Machine, a pre-war US spy-ops computer loaded into an Assaultron frame. She is a secondary Quest Giver for the Railroad faction.
  • In Fallout: New Vegas, Robert House was able to predict almost the exact date that the world would be plunged into a nuclear apocalypse and would have succeeded in fully protecting Las Vegas had he not been off by just one day. His ability to predict the odds and push them towards his favor is the game's way of justifying a high Luck Stat, with the cybernetic implant that boosts your Luck stat being a "Probability Calculator" that lets you perceive various probabilities and choose the best one. Luck is not simply the universe favoring you, but your skill in predetermining and calculating outcomes, variables and random events to do just what you need for a "miracle" to occur. The TV series would reveal however that House was present in a meeting between various pre-war corporations discussing whether or not to instigate the Great War, so it's implied he at least had some level of foreknowledge.
    Robert House: Success depends on forethought, dispassionate calculation of probabilities, accounting for every stray variable.
• In Fuga: Melodies of Steel, the final entry in Jeanne's files implies that the game's events are not happening per se. Instead, it is a simulation, with Jeanne trying to use the powers of the Juno to predict the upcoming events and calculate the best possible outcome for everyone involved as well as what she needs to do to reach it. This also explains how the time is getting reversed at certain moments in the story or when you get a Game Over — it's not actually getting reversed, instead Jeanne is rolling back the simulation to an earlier point and trying things differently.
• God of War Ragnarök casts the Norns as this. They are the Norse goddesses of fate, except they freely admit that there's no such thing as destiny. Instead, they're so good at reading people that they can predict the logical result of people's actions based on their character flaws — Kratos, for example, is doomed to continue his god-killing ways, because while "he's sad about it" now, he hasn't actually changed his behavior. The only way to escape the fates the Norns foretell is through Character Development.
  Urð: There is no grand design. No script. Only the choices you make. That your choices are so predictable merely makes us seem prescient.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1: This is how the Monado can grant visions of the future. As the world the game takes place in is composed entirely of ether, and it's able to manipulate ether on an effectively omniscient level, it's able to predict the future with perfect accuracy. Well, except that said predictions themselves allow the future to be changed.

Webcomics

• All sufficiently powerful Immortals can do this in El Goonish Shive. Actually seeing into the future is impossible, but Immortals have incredible means of gathering information and get smarter with age. This means that they can extrapolate the outcome of most situations based on what they already know. Unfortunately, they also get increasingly unstable with age, leading to one mad Immortal trying to create situations so chaotic that she can't predict the outcome.
• Sarilho: This is how augurs see the future. That's not future sight, that's... Probability!
• In Schlock Mercenary, the Bolocedeans manage to make some incredibly accurate inferences about their visitors before the visitors even arrive with only the teraport arrival of tiny sensors to herald the coming of a visitor, knowledge about the galaxy that is at least two million years out of date, and lots of computational power.
  Blue: The Stategic Simulation Team's report is here.
  Red: Thank you. Can you tell us what's coming?
  Blue: The most probable scenario is that intelligent life has evolved on the planet from which we rescued the feather-folk. They've harnessed the power of the galactic core and will shortly be arriving to ask about their relatives.
  [Beat]
  Red: That is probable?
  Blue: Would you like to see the math?
• In S.S.D.D., one of the Oracle's functions was to calculate and predict upcoming disasters. Unfortunately, it needed experimental data. Briefly, he tries teaching Tessa some at a casino, just for the laughs.

Western Animation

• Action Man (2000) gives Alex Mann this ability. When his adrenaline reaches a peak point, he can calculate what thing to do to defuse a situation (which usually involves an extreme sports stunt of some kind). This ability also gives him an uncontrollable type of precognition. Coach Grey, the man responsible for Alex's ability, has a computer that can do the same on a larger scale.
• In Avengers Assemble, Iron Man has a software that scans the battles and battle scenarios, and predicts the best strategy to defeat the enemy, along with the probability of success. They get in a big problem when Red Skull, who steals an armour in the first episode, finally finds this software and learns how to use it.
• Futurama: When Bender overclocks himself in "Overclockwise", he develops the ability to predict every possible outcome. He uses this ability to stop Mom's killbots, to predict when ceiling fans will fall on Zoidberg, and write down a detailed account of the future of Fry and Leela's relationship.

Real Life

It is of course impossible to do this with perfect accuracy thanks in large part to chaos theory, but a great amount of effort is spent in real life trying to ascertain what is probable to occur, especially when the stakes are high.

• Meteorology is perhaps the most important example. Forecasts of the weather date back to antiquity, though accurate forecasting is a more recent phenomenon. As with most examples here, the accuracy of forecasts drops with distance into the future.
• The entire discipline of Probability and Statistics deal in this trope. See also the Law of Large Numbers. This is why gambling casinos are profitable ventures: while the gambler may get lucky in an individual game or even on a wild night, over time and hundreds of thousands of games, the slight odds in the house's favor leads to a profit.
• Political polling is another huge venture where this trope is in play. Polls, however, are limited by sampling size and methodology, so their results are never certain.
• Astronomy. Most would consider the motions of planets, stars and other celestial bodies to be predictable, but in truth they are only so up to a point. On time scales of millions of years, the orbits of the planets in the solar system cannot be accurately predicted. Smaller bodies can be difficult to predict even within a century, due to them being far more susceptible to being nudged by the gravity of planets, and also by their own radiation and outgassing in the case of comets.

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