On Wed, Aug 1, 2012 at 8:04 AM, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au>wrote:
> Flipping a coin is never rational, although it may well be the best thing > to do. > I don't know what to make of that. If X is the best way to achieve a goal then X is the rational thing to do. The Monte Carlo Algorithm was invented soon after the end of the second world war specifically to model how a H-bomb worked, and it in effect flipped a coin millions of times. A thermonuclear fireball is far too complex to model from first principles so they generated random inputs for the position and momentum of particles and then performed deterministic calculations from them and then found the probability distribution. Without that the H-bomb would not exist. You can argue if building a H-bomb is a rational goal or not but it you want to figure out how to build one you've got to flip a coin many millions of times. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
