"Maybe."
The thing about evolutionary methods is that you don't know what they'll come up with; if you knew, you wouldn't need the evolutionary method. My tentative answer is that you can, but they'll likely break as soon as you change a variable you didn't realize had become an assumption of the system. Evolutionary methods tend to produce very rigid results, optimized around criteria you unwittingly specified, and solving it in ways you may not like and which aren't very generalizeable.
If you know nothing about evolutionary algorithms, I recommend looking into neural nets, as they tend to be easier to work with than most evolutionary approaches, and don't require much more domain knowledge than being able to verify their results.
NOTE - I mean the 3-body problem in orbital mechanics, not in atomic physics.
Hi there,
Some recent discussions here on LW have led me to ponder the 3-body problem again.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem#General_considerations:_solving_the_n-body_problem
I wonder if new and novel methods that exist today might be applied to solving the "unsolvable" 3-body problem.
Specifically I'm wondering "Can I create an evolutionary derived algorithm to solve equations of motion, and then can I continue on with it's evolution to solve the 3-body problem at the level of Sundman's slowly-converging series, and then can I continue on with it's evolution to come up with a closed-form solution to solve for the position of all the bodies in our solar system?
Another question is "What level of hyper-accurate model of the entire solar system would be needed?"
I think that Chaos Theory says this isn't possible. Let's suppose for the moment that Chaos Theory only exists because our models of the universe aren't accurate enough to be use to predict far into the future.
Here's why I'm posting this to LW. I don't really even know where to start with answering these questions, but I bet the LWers can point me in the right direction.