Honestly a pretty bad video by Veritasium standards.

Consider the nuclear reaction metaphor. It's clearly not memoryless. Eventually you'll run out of fissile material.

The diagram for that example is bad as well. Do arrows correspond to state transitions? Or do they correspond to forks in the process where one neutron results in two?

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mrlongroots 8 days ago | parent [-]

> Consider the nuclear reaction metaphor. It's clearly not memoryless. Eventually you'll run out of fissile material.

I think no real process is memoryless: time passes/machines degrade/human behaviors evolve. It is always an approximation that is found/assumed to hold within the modeled timeframe.

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0xDEAFBEAD 8 days ago | parent [-]

Sure but it's still the case that if you treat the reaction as memoryless, your model's predictions will be wildly wrong. It's not a good model in this case.

	▲	mrlongroots 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		It seems that most approaches treat neutron diffusion as memoryless (or at least stochastic): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_transport