MACHINE LEARNING’S ‘AMAZING’ ABILITY TO PREDICT CHAOS

HALF A CENTURY ago, the pioneers of chaos theory discovered that the “butterfly effect” makes long-term prediction impossible. Even the smallest perturbation to a complex system (like the weather, the economy or just about anything else) can touch off a concatenation of events that leads to a dramatically divergent future.

Unable to pin down the state of these systems precisely enough to predict how they’ll play out, we live under a veil of uncertainty.