Does anyone know any evidence for or against the feasibility of this concept? Policy makers in the uk are talking about investing in digital twins for the purpose of AI research and it just seems to be buzzword salad. Can someone point me to a reference?
"Small differences in initial conditions, such as those due to errors in measurements or due to rounding errors in numerical computation, can yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction of their behavior impossible in general. This can happen even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior follows a unique evolution and is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable. This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. The theory was summarized by Edward Lorenz as: Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future."
Chaos theory absolutely, unequivocally prevents such models from making detailed long-term predictions. But that doesn't mean the models are worthless; they can still make detailed short-term predictions and gross long-term predictions.
Ed Lorenz was a weather modeler; he invented chaos theory to explain the long-term failure of his models. But weather models and climate models are nevertheless useful today if we're aware of their limitations.
