Path: utzoo!yunexus!ists!mike From: mike@ists.yorku.ca (Mike Clarkson) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Randomness, the universe, and Turing machines Message-ID: <210@ists> Date: 22 Sep 88 10:45:25 GMT Article-I.D.: ists.210 References: <936@l.cc.purdue.edu> <29891@bbn.COM> Sender: news@ists Lines: 32 In article <29891@bbn.COM>, mesard@bbn.com (Wayne Mesard) writes: > But seriously, why does it seem so counter-intuitive. If you put a > dozen balls in a box and shake it, the resulting trajectories will > seem--to the uninformed eye--random and unpredictable. But given the > proper information [note I don't say observational powers and thus avoid > the Uncertainty Principle], one can exactly predict the paths that the > ball will take. > Now scale that model up by many thousand orders of magnitude. Instead > of balls, we have subatomic particles and more subtle forces at work, > but the principle is still the same. We may never haveenough > information to exactly predict events in the universe, or even a > reasonable subregion thereof. But the inability to make the exact > calculation doesn't mean that the universe isn't exactly, completely > deterministic. This Laplacian view of the Universe died out a long time ago, both in quantum mechanics, and non-equilibrium statistical thermodynamics. Amongst other things, the Laplacian view depends on both locality, and linearity of the equations involved, neither of which holds true in either of these cases. For a good introduction to this, see I. Prigogine's books, such as "Being to Becoming" (Freeman). The implications for large AI systems are quite apparent. Mike Clarkson mike@ists.UUCP Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science mike@ists.yorku.ca York University, North York, Ontario, uunet!mnetor!yunexus!ists!mike CANADA M3J 1P3 +1 (416) 736-5611