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. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences. But now the robots are here to help.