Ada Palmer

It reasons like someone from 1913 would have reasoned with 1913's uncertainties and 1913's assumptions about the future.

It doesn't know that Archduke Franz Ferdinand will be assassinated.

It doesn't know about tanks or poison gas or the collapse of empires.

Due to the scarcity of texts, it probably won't be possible to train a 1492 history LLM.

But a 1913 one is clearly possible.

So what does that mean?

Can we run simulations of the July crisis?

Populate the roles with LLM agents trained on pre-1913 texts, Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas, British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, Serbian Prime Minister Pasik, and watch 10,000 versions of 1914 unfold.

Would we see the Great War emerge in 94% of runs, or only 60%?

Would we find that small changes, a different response to the Austrian ultimatum, a faster Russian mobilization, a clearer British commitment to France, consistently deflect the trajectory toward peace, or do they merely shift which powers fight and when?

These aren't idle questions.

They go to the heart of historical causation.

Was the Great War inevitable, locked in by alliance structures and arms races and imperial rivalries?

Or was it contingent, the product of specific decisions made under pressure by specific individuals who might have chosen differently?

Historians have debated this for a century.

Palmer's simulation suggests a new approach.

Don't argue, simulate.

Map the probability distribution.

But this raises a deeper question.

Given the butterfly effect, can actors in chaotic systems achieve their goals at all?