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Comment by ZooCow | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar thought but about asking the LLM to predict “future” major historical events. How much prompting would it take to predict wars, etc.?

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You mean train on pre-1939 data and predict how WWII would go?

Right. If it were trained through August 1939, how much prompting would be necessary to get it to predict aspects of WWII.

Man, that would be a fascinating experiment. Would it be able to predict who wins and when? Would it be able to predict the Cold War?

But we know Hitler has a Time Machine that goes forward, he doesn’t need to return to use that knowledge as he already has a timeline here to use. Definitely risks involved here.

If you build an oracle that tells you who wins the war that far in the future, you build a simulator that allows anyone to win any war. Everything is dual use.

That will never work on any complex system that behaves chaotically, such as the weather or complex human endeavors. Tiny uncertainties in the initial conditions rapidly turn into large uncertainties in the outcomes.

Not an LLM but models could get pretty good at weather

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/12/04/1107892/google-d...

No, they don't, since the weather is chaotic.

I mean, there are the theorems about how close you can get, and models are not better than theoretically possible.

Yeah, I wish more people understood that it is simply not possible to make precise long-term forecasts of chaotic systems. Whether it is weather, financial markets, etc.

It is not that we don't know yet because our models are inadequate, it's that it is unknowable.

The problem is we stupidly branded the field "chaos theory" and made it sound like bullshit so the ideas of non-linear dynamics have largely been lost on several generations at this point.

Not just chaos theory but "chaos theory" + psychedelic fractal artwork. Then the popular James Gleick book, "Chaos: making a new science" just sounds like complete bullshit and it sold a ton of copies.

I only started studying non-linear dynamics in about 2015 after first running across it in the late 90s but I literally thought it was all pseudoscience then.

Between "chaos theory", fractals and a best selling book it would be hard to frame a new scientific field as pseudoscience more than what played out.

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