Neural World Determination

by Kaili Zhu

Can Neural Network represent everything, even the whole world?

Yesterday, I heard the following dialogue:
A: The World Cup tonight is Argentina against France.
B: When I was watching the Argentina, it never lost scores, but always scored goals.
A: Please look at the game tonight!

Yeah, the conversation is quite funny, because it seems that if B is watching the game, then Argentina will never lose scores, but obviously, whether B is watching the game or not, will make no difference to the game itself. However sometimes, people may have the feeling that some event happened because I made some action which might be independent to the event itself, but if I made another action, then the later results might be different.

I used to suppose that our society is a big network that connects all of us. If it is true, then there should be some connections between every two person in the world with some weights (>= 0). In other words, B might be related to Messi with a connection (by now, the average weight should be approximate to 0), and because the weight is too small, what B has done might have no affect on what Messi will do in the future.

However, in a deterministic nonlinear system, a former small change can result in large differences in a later stage, and this phenomenon is named the Butterfly Effect. It is easy to explain: in a former layer of the neural network, some small weights might be enlarged by later nonlinear transformation, also some big weights might be reduced. So what you do today, can affect the life of your descendants, as the neural network can pass information throughout.

Sometimes, people might encounter a scene that they think they have dreamed about it. But what if it is not the dream, but an event that we have made before and will make in the future? When we are training a Neural Network, we input data, run the network forward, run it back by using gradient descent, and update parameters, again and again. So why isn't our society being trained by some GOD? Why haven't we experienced these events in the former iterations, and in this iteration, the fate of all the people is determined, but we just do not realize?