[FRIAM] anthropological observations

[Marcus Daniels]

Nick writes:



< I must be a determinist at heart because I instinctively believe that to say an event is random is to confess one’s ignorance, one’s laziness, or both. >


Deterministic systems can behave in an apparently random fashion<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory> with tiny differences in initial conditions.  (Or consider the ubiquitous Mersenne Twister random number generator with a period of 219937 − 1.)    But to get infinite precision on initial conditions one can require infinite resources, as can propagating exact arithmetic.    How do these infinite resources fit in a finite system?



Marcus


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