Is it possible to predict the far future before the near future is known accurately?

Abstract

It has always been the dream of mankind to predict the future. If the future is governed by laws of physics, like in the case of the weather, one can try to make a model, solve the associated equations, and thus predict the future. However, to make accurate predictions can require extremely large amounts of computation. If we need seven days to compute a prediction for the weather tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, the prediction arrives too late and is thus not a prediction any more. Although it may seem improbable, with the advent of powerful computers with many parallel processors, it is possible to compute a prediction for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow simultaneously. We describe a mathematical algorithm which is designed to achieve this.