Machine Learning's 'Amazing' Ability to Predict Chaos Quanta Magazine

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. But now the robots are here to help. In a series of results reported in the journals Physical Review Letters and Chaos, scientists have used machine learning -- the same computational technique behind recent successes in artificial intelligence -- to predict the future evolution of chaotic systems out to stunningly distant horizons.