At this rate, finding the last digit is probably just a few years down the road.

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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    2 days ago

    Yeah, I mean math and even science aren’t always intuitive, so we have to have rules and theories to go by that demonstrate repeatability. Subatomic physics doesn’t even really work like our models say, it’s just that the models give the best results in predicting what we’ll find.

    Another example is randomness. Not all random numbers are the same, it depends on how you derive them as to what you’ll get. I guess in some way that’s related to what numbers will pop up for an irrational number. It’s said with enough monkeys randomly typing on typewriters eventually you’ll get a Shakespeare work. It already happened a number of times… since we’re in sense monkeys and got a number of Shakespeare works. Didn’t even need typewriters.

    • tomiant@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      So it basically still boils down to a question of determinism vs, well, not free will but, I guess “indeterminism” would be a word for it. Semantics kind of break down at explaining the nature of existence at some point. I wonder if that is true for mathematics as well.

      It’s like that quote of Alfred Korzybski’s, “the map is not the terrain”. The explanation is not reality, it must by necessity be something less, or something different from it.