"Thor" is a supercomputer dedicated to the study of religion, installed at the University of Bialystok in Poland. It is the second such machine built for this purpose — the first was designed for the 📝Center for Mind and Culture — and it was funded through the Religion, Ideology, and Prosociality (RIP) project, a collaboration between the Norwegian and Polish governments to study the rise of atheism in Poland. Thor doubles the computing power available to universities in Eastern Poland; for its first three years it is reserved for the study of complex social systems before being opened to other analyses at the university. Access is currently limited to a small research team: Dr. Konrad Talmot-Kaminski (Professor of Religion at the University of Bialystok), 📝F. LeRon Shults, and me, for work on 📝Multi-Agent AI (MAAI) and other forms of modeling and simulation of religion. A video outlining the project and the machine is available here.
Thor is the kind of infrastructure I've wanted for this field for years — enough horsepower to simulate religious social systems at scale rather than gesture at them. It's also where new versions of the 📝AI Guru can be trained. Most of what I build assumes religions can be digitized, modeled, and forecast; Thor is the hardware that makes that assumption testable.