rainbow wrote:

Count Otto Black wrote:

rainbow wrote:

Count Otto Black wrote:

rainbow wrote:Yes, and since nobody but you has made that assertion, it remains an absurdity.

I haven't made that assertion either.

It means an unpredictable outcome.

Is a horse race random?

Only when the winner is a batch of strawberry jam.

We know the starting position of each horse and their direction and their destination. We might know their form in previous races, their age and the weight they'll be carrying. Is the outcome predictable?

Yes.
Is the next number on a roulette wheel predictable?

Kind of yesish, just before the ball drops, but no if it is to guess some arbitrary spin tomorrow. Same as planetary motion. Predictable in the near-term but we cannot easily identify where a planet will be in the long term.

Macdoc wrote:Try this

An example of a stochastic process in the natural world is pressure in a gas as modeled by the Wiener process. Even though (classically speaking) each molecule is moving in a deterministic path, the motion of a collection of them is computationally and practically unpredictable. A large enough set of molecules will exhibit stochastic characteristics, such as filling the container, exerting equal pressure, diffusing along concentration gradients, etc. These are emergent properties of the systems.
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There are still bounds in chaotic systems - Schroedinger comes to mind

Thus, because of this systemic stochastic behavior in collections of molecules large enough for us to manipulate them conveniently, while it is impossible to predict the fates of individual molecules it is quite simple to predict the general fate of a collection of molecules- either by having observed similar outcomes at some earlier time experimentally or by invoking a model suited to the situation.

Chemical reactions are unpredictable with respect to individual participants and deterministic with respect to chemical systems.