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The answer should be NO, but, do you think this would work ?
Good scientists are not only able to uncover patterns in the things they study, but to use this information to predict the future. Meteorologists study atmospheric pressure and wind speed to predict the trajectories of future storms. A biologist may predict the growth of a tumor based on its current size and development. A financial analyst may try to predict the ups and downs of a stock based on things like market capitalization or cash flow.
Perhaps even more interesting than the above phenomena is that of predicting the behavior of human beings. Attempts to predict how people will behave have existed since the origins of humankind. Early humans had to trust their instincts. Today, marketers, politicians, trial lawyers and more make their living on predicting human behavior. Predicting human behavior, in all of its forms, is big business. So, how does mathematics do in predicting our own behavior in general? Despite advances in stock market analytics, economics, political polling and cognitive neuroscience – all of which ultimately endeavor to predict human behavior – science may never be able to do so with perfect certainty.
[...] As technology develops, scientists may find that we can predict human behavior rather well in one area, while still lacking in another. It's very difficult to give an overall sense of the limitations. For instance, facial recognition may be easier to emulate because vision is one of many human sensory processing systems, or because there are only so many ways faces can differ. On the other hand, predicting voting behavior, especially based on the 2016 presidential election, is quite another story. There are many complex and not yet understood reasons why humans do what they do.
Still others argue that, theoretically at least, that perfect prediction will someday be possible. Until then, with any luck, mathematics and statistics may help us increasingly account for what people, on average, will do next.
https://theconversation.com/can-math-predict-what-youll-do-next-78892
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Hartree on Sunday December 17 2017, @08:34PM (1 child)
You don't even have to invoke quantum mechanics to give an example. Many systems that are quite well modeled by classical mechanics are effectively unpredictable regardless of how much computing power you throw at then.
Sensitivity to initial conditions is the concept here. Though completely deterministic, the outcomes depend on the tiniest differences in the starting conditions. A good example is the double pendulum. It's a mechanically simple system, but long term predictions of its behavior are effectively impossible in most cases as an infinitely tiny error in knowing the starting point can cause the behavior to diverge rapidly from what you predict.
This is the celebrated "butterfly effect", but without the metaphysics and hype some attach to it.
Much of the work on controlling such chaotic systems is actually work on keeping them in the regimes where they are stable rather than precise control. And, those areas can be very stable indeed.
An example is your heart rhythm. There's a bit of instability there, but a disruption quickly goes back to the core behavior. In fact, when an EKG gets too regular, it's sometimes a sign the heart is failing.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Monday December 18 2017, @04:53AM
I came here to say this. Many classical systems are chaotic dynamic systems. Predictions can be made for some short time into the future, but as you attempt to predict further and further into the future actual reality and predictions from the model diverge. Soon the model is useless. No amount of information about the past helps with future predictions, beyond a certain point.