Seymour Cray is often referred to as the “father of supercomputing.” His Cray-1, which was first shipped in 1976, is one of the most successful supercomputers in history, selling 80 by the end of its lifetime. It’s also physically recognisable due to being shaped like the letter C, with seats around the edge which cover the power supplies and cooling system. Cray died in 1996 following a car accident and today his company is a subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard. But Cray supercomputers continue to be developed and built, with one system operated by the UK’s Met Office. Their Cray XC40 supercomputing system has been in operation since 2016 and is used to for climate analysis and weather prediction.
However, will their mighty machine soon be replaced by a small one? Could be. A team of academics say that the weather prediction model they’ve developed is as good as the supercomputer ones but costs far less and operates in much quicker time. How has this been possible? AI. The team have built a system they call Aardvark which can be trained on historical weather data in a relatively short space of time. It’s then possible to run the resulting model on a desktop computer to generate a forecast from current observations within a matter of minutes, leading the team to claim “Aardvark provides accurate forecasts that are orders of magnitude quicker to generate than existing systems.” The end may be nigh for supercomputers, at least in this area of work.
Link: Aardvark beats groundhogs and supercomputers in weather forecasting
But even with AI in play, how good can we actually become at predicting the weather? Forecasting has been notoriously difficult to crack, hence the powerful supercomputers thrown at it. The factors involved are just so many and so variable. Yet, is there is even more to it than that? In the Bible, the bewildering power of uncontrollable weather systems are seen as God commanding His invisible heavenly forces for His own purposes upon the earth:
He bowed the heavens and came down; thick darkness was under his feet. He rode on a cherub and flew; he came swiftly on the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him, thick clouds dark with water. Out of the brightness before him hailstones and coals of fire broke through his clouds. The LORD also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered his voice, hailstones and coals of fire. And he sent out his arrows and scattered them; he flashed forth lightnings and routed them. (Psalm 18:9-14)
So is the weather something which ultimately cannot be fully predicted by computer systems no matter how ingenious? Of course, most of the time God sustains this world, through his angelic servants, in ways which are regular and consistent. This is what sits behind our ability to study nature, conduct experiments, discover scientific laws and make predictions. It’s because, normally, God does the same thing, the same way, time after time after time: drop an apple and it always moves towards the ground at a predictable pace. Yet, it doesn’t have to! As God has shown in His miracles, laws can be “broken” by Him: that’s His prerogative as the creator. And, maybe, in the weather, God does “break” the laws a little bit more often, because this is one of His ways of disturbing the arrogant assumptions of sinful humanity. If so, then however much our computerised forecasting improves, we will still keep finding ourselves surprised by the weather.
Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash
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Introduction to this series of posts
Cover photo by Denley Photography on Unsplash
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language.