This might just be my computer-focused life talking
I’m a software eng too, but I have broad interests. Like I said, the philosophic use doesn’t really have a place in this discussion and I messed up by bringing it in. The only way it would be relevant is if the universe is a simulation because, as you guessed, then free will itself becomes part of the equation.
I also don’t know why predictability would be solely based on the numbers that came before
There’s a miscommunication happening here, and I’m wondering if I’m not explaining myself well. Election predictions use polling as their dataset, and there are no calculations that really go into predicting the results other than comparing the numbers within those sets. That’s why they’re notoriously garbage (every single pollster had Hillary winning in late October 2016, for example). Also, there aren’t any calculations that go into a CEO/Boardroom’s intuitions on how shareholders will react to policy changes, so I’m not sure about the relevance here. In the case of pi, there is no dataset that you can use that tells you what the next unknown number in pi is. The only way to get that number is to run a very complex calculation. Calculations are not predictions.