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
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