On Sun, Apr 10, 2016 Jonathan Day <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Chaos produces something other than noise precisely because it's not > random. It's not predictable, but it's entirely deterministic. True. > > > Pi can be calculated as a function, but any specific digit can also be > calculated directly, which implies the digits are non-random in some sense. The fact that there is a deterministic process that allows you to produce any finite sequence of PI means that it is not random, although knowing the first 1000 digits would be of no help in guessing what the 1001 digit would be unless you assumed that the sequence was PI, and there are an infinite number of sequences that have the same first 1000 digits as PI but then diverge. And for most numbers on the real number line (nearly all in fact) there is no deterministic way to even approximate them; although infinitely numerous there is no way to point to a particular one and thus unlike PI they can have no name. > > > If you do not need infinite precision and infinite range, because > everything can be inferred from a finite set of finite-length seeds, If you don't know EXACTLY how close a comet comes to Jupiter and if you don't know the gravitational constant with INFINITE precision ( it's only known to 3 significant digits and we need to know a infinite number of those digits ) then your error in predicting the comet's position in the finite future can be arbitrarily large. > Chaos produces something other than noise precisely because it's not > random. It's not predictable, but it's entirely deterministic. Perhaps one of those Real numbers that have no name and that no deterministic process can even approximate tells the quantum foam how to behave. Or maybe nothing tells the quantum foam how to behave; after all, why does every event have to have a cause? John K Clark > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
