9. Bigger brother

Pierre puts the math together seconds before participants respond in reality - that's not so bad. Yes, it means a computer can piece together circumstances related to time, space, environment and conditions to come up with a result that happens to be the actual decision from the affected person. But seriously, a few seconds before won't make much of a difference. If Pierre was applied to a hostage situation, then maybe we'll see dramatic possibilities from precognition.

Free will is perhaps, as written, the spontaneous decision-making at the moment of choice. Otherwise, isn't it just great planning? Knowing what my colleagues will eat for lunch on a Monday is the result of weeks of hanging around the same people for Monday lunch and seeing patterns in behaviour. That's it. If the order is or isn't expected, it is still free will on the part of my colleague. The choices are more or less the same, and faced with these, my colleague chooses wan tan mee. If it isn't wan tan mee, then the pattern of preference is broken for that week. No biggie.

Is Pierre going to do the same - seek patterns and make judgments? If a participant on the show tends to be passive and inclined to follow the opinion (as a character trait), then we would expect a particular outcome in certain situations, would we not? It may be a set of chemicals in the brain that trigger this response but isn't it rather a kink in the participant's nature through natural (or unnatural, as the case may be) development?

I've no real issue with a computer predicting human responses to situations. We've been doing that in the fields of economics, sociology, politics, psychology and medicine with various degrees of success. We become predictable as humans. We develop to follow order and systems, so it is inevitable that all the cogs, wheels and cycles click and mesh.