It's a very appealing kind of a priori theory, but the thing about theories is they're supposed to make predictions.

这是一个很有吸引力的早期理论，但是理论的意义在于,它们可以被用来进行预测。

耶鲁公开课 - 金融市场课程节选

And then we try and get our simulation to match the past, and hope that that will help it predict the future.

尝试让仿真程序能和这一部分实际数据相符，并且希望它能够帮我们对未来进行预测。

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选

It just turns out to be wrong but another way-- And so one way to attack and address a scientific theory is to view it as just to see whether or not it works.

但最终被证明是错误的-,评判一个理论,是否属于科学理论的另一种情况,就是看它是否成功的进行了预测。

耶鲁公开课 - 心理学导论课程节选

And we can just extrapolate in a straight line We before saw some examples where I had an algorithm to generate points, and we fit a curve to it, used the curve to predict future points and discovered it was nowhere close.

我们可以干脆用一条直线来描述它,我们之前看到在一些例子中,我用一个算法去生成一些点，然后用一条曲线对它进行拟合，然后用这条曲线来预测未来的点,最后却发现结果完全不对。

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选