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Does God play dice?

Aaron Goh's picture

I once came across a novel which contains the following (verbatim) :

Laplace had once prepared a paper for the Academie, claiming that it would be possible to predict the outcome of a game of dice if one had precise knowledge of every factor, such as the weight of the die, the exact way in which the hand moved, the strength of that hand, and the force of each throw.

Now I have forgotten the title of the novel nor its author, and neither do I know if Laplace really said these words (from the internet I gather that discussion about God and dice is accredited to Einstein or Hawking).

But I wonder whether anyone has managed to make precise predictions of the number of dice rolled using mechanics.  Can it be done, say using some standard mechanics software?

I am just curious about the thing we call luck or randomness.

 

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