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A comment on Claude Shannon: How a Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives. Parent comment

Re:Claude Shannon: How a Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives by yulker on Saturday July 22, 2017 @07:12AM (#14826573)
This sort of determinism seems wrong. It implies that if you had a Monte Carlo simulation engine of the universe and ran it 1,000 times beginning at the 20th century through today, you would expect those iterations to look a lot like our world. Only with some of the names and people being different, but fundamentally, everything else would still have happened.

That seems unlikely, no?

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Re:Claude Shannon: How a Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives by TeMPOraL on Saturday July 22, 2017 @09:29AM (#14827094)
Yeah, sort of. I'd say it's quite likely.

The thing about how engineering and the markets work - they are attracted towards local optimas. So I'd expect each iteration to e.g. have cars that are more-less like we know. I'd expect it to have soft drinks; maybe not Coca Cola, but something very similar and recognizable to us, etc.

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