Originally Posted by
factotum
The problem isn't really computational capability but the ability to know what the current state of the universe is. Going back to my weather example from earlier, if you could somehow create a computer with perfect ability to calculate future weather, and you fed into it the exact values for temperature, pressure, wind speed and so on for points spaced one metre apart in the atmosphere--we'll ignore for now the absolute physical impossibility of making those measurements--and you let it run the simulation, it would still be completely different from the *actual* weather within a month, simply because it didn't have the information of what was happening in between those data points. Plus it wouldn't be able to take into account atmospheric variations caused by landslides or even people walking from one place to another.