AI and cognitive psychology rant (getting more and more OT - tell me if I should shut up)

[Stephen Horne]

On Sun, 02 Nov 2003 08:12:09 GMT, "Andrew Dalke"
<adalke at mindspring.com> wrote:

>Orbital mechanics for the major planets are also chaotic, it's just that the
>time frame for problems well exceeds the life of the sun.  (As I recall;
>don't have a reference handy.)

Are you sure?

I know that multi-object gravitational systems can be chaotic in
principle (and I believe that the orbits of some of Jupiters moons are
a case in point) but I thought the orbit of the planets around the sun
had been proven stable. Which implies that you needn't worry about
chaos unless you are worried about the minor deviations from the
idealised orbits - the idealised bit can be treated as constant, and
forms a very close approximation of reality no matter what timescale
you are working in.

It was one of the big successes of the Laplace transform, IIRC. But I
could be mistaken.


-- 
Steve Horne

steve at ninereeds dot fsnet dot co dot uk