naturalplastic wrote:
Why dont you make the question simpler for yourself (and the rest of us).
What if you threw dice a hundred times in a row.
Or what if you spun a roulette wheel a hundred times.
And then went back in time and did the same?
Would you get the same sequence of a 100 numbers?
It would be no different than going back the next day and throwing the same dice a hundred times.
You would get a different set of 100 numbers.
But if you used a random number generator in a computer you might actually get the same sequence of 100 numbers because random number generators are not really random.
Rolling dice and spinning roulette are deterministic processes that are unpredictable. And the reason for their lack of predictability is because they are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. So if you were to perform 100 dice rolls one day, then travel back in time and do it all over again, the initial conditions would be different and thus the results would be different. There are deterministic recursive functions that can produce unpredictable results provided that they're highly sensitive to initial conditions. That's the essence of the
Butterfly Effect.
12 Apr 2012, 5:17 pm
