Robots, Chaos, and Dune: Reflections on Unpredictability
My thoughts on how a meteorology paper published in 1963 explains the difference between two giants of science fiction, with some personal reflections on how they each influence my own work. Introduction My research began in the narrow field of reinforcement learning applied to constrained, optimal control. Solutions were well-structured, precise, and mathematically rigorous. This fit neatly into a deterministic view of the world - if I defined everything correctly and did the math, things would work out well. There was a comfort in this. ...