I began the experiment when Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Politburo were key players shaping the fate of the world; by the time I started to write up the results, the USSR existed only on historical maps and Gorbachev was doing commercials for Pizza Hut. The final results appeared in 2005—twenty-one years, six presidential elections, and three wars after I sat on the National Research Council panel that got me thinking about forecasting.
