AI and cognitive psychology rant (getting more and more OT - tell me if I should shut up)

[Stephen Horne]

On Sat, 01 Nov 2003 18:55:18 GMT, GrayGeek <jkrepsBEAR at FISHneb.rr.com>
wrote:

>Weather (3D fluid dynamics) is chaotic both here on Earth and on Jupiter. 
>As Dr. Lorenz established when he tried to model Earth's weather, prediction
>of future events based on past behavior (deterministic modeling) is not
>possible with chaotic events.  Current weather models predicting global or
>regional temperatures 50 years from now obtain those results by careful
>choices of initial conditions and assumptions.  In a chaotic system
>changing the inputs by even a small fractional amount causes wild swings in
>the output, but for deterministic models fractional changes on the input
>produce predictable outputs.

Very true for predicting weather, but the 50 years hence models are
predicting climate. That is a different layer of abstraction, and not
necessarily chaotic (at least on the same timescales) as shown by the
fact that the real world climate only changes relatively slowly -
despite some quite random inputs such as sunspot activity which have
nothing to do with chaos in the climate model.

Whether these models are actually accurate (or rather which, if any)
is, of course, a whole other question. I guess we'll find out in 50
years time ;-)

>>> So "objectively" science gains more knowledge, but
>>> relatively speaking (seeing it as a percentage of that what is
>>> currently known to be not known, but knowable in principle) science is
>>> loosing ground fast. Also an even greater area of the universe is
>>> supposed to exist that we will not even have a chance *ever* to know
>>> anything about.
>
>Exactly.  Even worse, the various peripherals of Physics and Math are
>getting so esoteric that scholars in those areas are losing their ability
>to communicate to each other.  It is almost like casting chicken entrails.

There are just too many too abstract fields to be studied, I guess -
at some point, we'll need more specialists than the entire human
population!

Better start working on them AI systems ;-)


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk