Re: Usefulness ... ?
And the nails being elastic will vibrate so even is there are no vibrations coming from the environment after the ball hits the first nail the rest of them will be vibrating slightly before it gets to the second. Don't forget the influence of the grain of the wood...
The real world is full of little details that get in the way of predictability.
Proteins fold themselves consistently, they're all built systematically by adding one amino acid to another so it should be possible to calculate the forces that will determine the new configuration from the old as each one is added - but informed guesswork, i.e. AI, is better at working out the configuration from the sequence than predictions based on things we should, in theory, be able to work out.