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Rob Korobkin

Deterministic Systems:
• While deterministic systems may be different at different points in time, they can only be a single way at a single point in time. While it may look different at t = 5 seconds vs. t = 1 minute, the system will always look the same way at t=5.
• Rendered in four dimensions, a deterministic system is therefore fixed as there is no possibility of variation given time t. Just as an object is considered fixed in three-space if its three-dimensional coordinates stay constant., an object that is moving in a deterministic way is fixed in four dimensions as its four-dimensional coordinates cannot change. So deterministic systems can be thought of as solid objects in the space-time continuum.

Nondeterministic Systems:
• By definition, in order for a system to be nondeterministic, it must be possible for it to be any of a number of ways at a given point of time: it’s four dimensional coordinates cannot be fixed. If a system is not deterministic, simply knowing the time t = 15 will not be enough to tell you what will be happening in the system.
• One way to think about this, is that it’s an issue of knowledge and information: we don’t / can’t KNOW what the system will look like at t = 15. This raises several questions that I don’t feel like answering right now:
o What is the difference between not being able to know what will happen in the system because what happens is truly random or simply not knowing what will happen because you lack the information / ability to predict?
o Put differently, what s the difference between looking at a book in a language that you can’t read and looking at a book that actually has a random series of letters or a book that nobody has ever read? If you program a function to take a variable input but don’t program it do anything with the variable and don’t return it, does that make the variable random?
o Where is the randomness: is it in the subjective conscious of the observer who doesn’t know the pattern or is it somehow intrinsically in the system itself? If we define randomness as not being able to know what will happen, does that mean that deterministic systems require that somebody be able to predict them and does that somebody have to exist?
o What about things that only happen once? A deterministic system works out the same way every time, but what if the system can only be run once, so there’s no way to know if it would work out differently if run again.
o If faced with a system who’s logic you can’t figure out, is it better to assume that the system is in fact random or to assume that it has been organized by a logic you don’t see. Is there a practical difference between these two assumptions?