Devil's Fork

by Spencer Adams

CHAPTER 13

  TUESDAY

  Wuhan, China

  NATPAC sat uncomfortably in his office chair. The night further darkened his office with each passing minute. He wanted to go home after a long day. He put out his cigarette in the ashtray on his desk and shut down his computer.

  His mind thought in decision trees. It was a simple tool used in economics to plan future decisions. It was helpful if someone wanted to see where a series of decisions would lead. It required one to imagine all of the situations resulting from an initial decision. Then for each new situation, one imagines the consequence of another decision. Each situation was typically assigned a probability. The technique was known as a tree because it allowed someone to visualize decisions and consequences similar to branches of a tree.

  NATPAC remembered being taught decision trees by imagining how to spend an afternoon: “I can either go to the park or to a café. If I go to the park there is a 30% chance it will rain and a 70% chance it will not. If I go to the park and it rains I will have to run home. But if I go to the park and it does not rain I will be able to sit outside and read.” This was how he was used to thinking. This technique allowed decision-making to be quantitative and precise. Thinking in decision trees helped NATPAC map out all of the possibilities. People who were not quantitative thinkers, like those in one region of the world NATPAC knew, very often ended up making mistakes in their decisions simply because of not mapping it out. NATPAC had no problem visualizing trees multiple nodes deep: