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A comment on Scientists find an effective solution for the three-body problem. Parent comment

Re:Scientists find an effective solution for the three-body ... by HWR_14 on Saturday August 14, 2021 @10:46AM (#28181053)
As I understand it, "random and unpredictable" means impossible to measure the initial state in sufficient precision and/or computationally impossible to calculate in a reasonable amount of time.

The actual underlying math is deterministic.

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Re:Scientists find an effective solution for the three-body ... by argvargc on Saturday August 14, 2021 @04:00PM (#28183537)
It seems the problem is often mis-stated - there is no calculation problem, the problem is in adequately defining/sampling the initial data.

It's maybe similar to predicting the weather - we can have all the perfect equations in the world for fluid dynamics and heat flow etc, but until we have system-invisible temperature and humidity sensors for every square millimetre of atmosphere and earth volume, we won't be able to predict the weather very accurately or very far ahead.

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