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From: nick@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: The success of AI (misunderstandings)
Message-ID: <8710260721.AA26918@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Mon, 26-Oct-87 02:22:01 EST
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Posted: Mon Oct 26 02:22:01 1987
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    In article <193@PT.CS.CMU.EDU> spe@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Sean Engelson) writes:

    >Given a sufficiently powerful computer, I could, in theory, simulate
    >the human body and brain to any desired degree of accuracy.

	You are in good company.  Laplace thought much the same thing
about the entire physical universe.

	However, some results in chaos theory appear to imply that
complex real systems may not be predictable even in principle.  In a
dynamic system with sufficiently 'sensitive dependence on intial
conditions' arbitrarily large separations can appear (in the state
space) between points that were initially arbitrarily close.  No
conceivable system of measurement can get around the fact that the
behavior of the system itself 'systematically' erodes our information
about its state.

	For a good intro to chaos theory, see the article by Farmer,
Packard, et. al. in Scientific American December 86..