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. The approach is being lauded by outside experts as groundbreaking and likely to find wide application.