Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…A lot of this was like community crowdsourced by amateur mathematicians actually. So, I knew about that work. And so that is part of what inspired me to propose the same thing with Navier-Stokes. Seriously, analog is much worse than digital. It’s going to be… You can’t just directly take deconstructions in the Game of Life and plunk them in. But again, it shows it’s possible. There’s a kind of emergence that happens with these cellular automata local rules… maybe it’s similar to fluids, I don’t know, but local rules operating at scale can create these incredibly complex dynamic structures. Do you think any of that is amenable to mathematical analysis? Do we have the tools to say something profound about that? The thing is, you can get these emergent very complicated structures, but only with very carefully prepared initial conditions. So, these glider guns and gates and self-propelled machines, if you just plunk on randomly some cells and you unlink them, you will not see any of these. And that’s the analogous situation with Navier-Stokes again, that with typical initial conditions, you will not have any of this weird computation going on. But basically through engineering, by specially designing things in a very special way, you can make clever constructions.…

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