3 ms·
You Can’t Predict a Game of Pinball
- PaulHoule 4y ago… or the weather more than a certain time in advance. What’s amazing is how bad the discussion on that (rather good) article is, as it is a matter of faith in that community that higher intelligence will take our problems away like the UFO cults of the 1970s. What that article doesn’t point out is the other kinds of intractability that have turned up in nonlinear mechanics, for instance that hamiltonian chaos with N=2 position variables is largely a solved problem but little progress has been made for N>2 since the 1970s. Einstein, Feynman and other early physicists didn’t make such rapid progress because they were smarter than Steven Hawking, Ed Witten and Lee Smolin but because experiments were possible to test their theories and today they’re not. Dark Matter is an unsolved problem not because our theoreticians aren’t smart enough but because the experimental problem is so difficult. We could have “intelligence quotient 10,000” right out of an a.e. van vogt novel and you will still die of cancer.