Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Pertaining to or imbued with the philosophy of determinism.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective of or pertaining to determinism.
  • adjective causally determined and not subject to random chance.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective of, or relating to determinism
  • adjective mathematics, of a Turing machine having at most one instruction associated with any given internal state
  • adjective physics, of a system Having exactly predictable time evolution.
  • adjective computing, of an algorithm Having each state depend only on the immediately previous state, as opposed to having some states depend on backtracking where there may be multiple possible next actions and no way to choose between them except by trying each one and backtracking upon failure.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective an inevitable consequence of antecedent sufficient causes

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Algorithmic means we can describe it in deterministic detail: i.e. "given this condition, this outcome will happen".

    Are Changes Brewing and How Does the Mind Fit In? 2008

  • Algorithmic means we can describe it in deterministic detail: i.e. "given this condition, this outcome will happen".

    Are Changes Brewing and How Does the Mind Fit In? 2008

  • But in reality, isn’t each trial totally deterministic from the moment the coin is tossed?

    The Real, Random World and AIs « Hyperpat’s HyperDay 2006

  • But in reality, isn’t each trial totally deterministic from the moment the coin is tossed?

    2006 October « Hyperpat’s HyperDay 2006

  • Reductionism was the outcome of combining the atomism that early modern physicists took over from Epicureanism with the notion of deterministic laws of physics.

    Nancey Murphy - Is “Nonreductive Physicalism” an Oxymoron? William Harryman 2009

  • The focus at that time was something called deterministic chaos, in which a small perturbation can lead to a huge change in the system - the famous "butterfly effect".

    New Scientist - Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain William Harryman 2009

  • All the computer models that is to say the deterministic ones have predicted that temperature would keep on going up from 1998 to 2005.

    Daily Telegraph « Climate Audit 2006

  • Small populations go extinct because (1) all populations fluctuate in size from time to time, under the influence of two kinds of factors, which ecologists refer to as deterministic and stochastic; and (2) small populations, unlike big ones, stand a good chance of fluctuating to zero, since zero is not far away.

    The Song of The Dodo David Quammen 2004

  • Small populations go extinct because (1) all populations fluctuate in size from time to time, under the influence of two kinds of factors, which ecologists refer to as deterministic and stochastic; and (2) small populations, unlike big ones, stand a good chance of fluctuating to zero, since zero is not far away.

    The Song of The Dodo David Quammen 2004

  • However, if the subject is part of nature there would seem to be no way of explaining how a nature which we can only know as deterministic can give rise to a subject which seems to transcend determinism in its knowing and in its ethical doings.

    Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling Bowie, Andrew 2001

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