The Limitations of Digital Computers
via British Science Museum Blog
Their study builds on a well-known insight from Edward Lorenz of MITwho, in 1961, wished to repeat one of his weather simulations using a simple computer model but got quite different results because of a tiny rounding error in the numbers he fed into the computer.
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The richness of the real world is entrained with irrational numbers which cannot be represented on any digital computer (‘and will not be representable on a quantum computer either’, he adds). ‘For Lorenz, it was a very small change in the last few decimal places in the numbers used to start a simulation that caused his diverging results,’ he says. ‘What neither he nor others realised, and is highlighted in our new work, is that any such finite (rational) initial condition describes a behaviour which may be statistically highly unrepresentative’.
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