CHAOS (Deterministic)
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 411 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Methodology or model |
Unpredictability in a globally deterministic system.
Systems affected by deterministic chaos are nonlinear and have a high sensitivity to initial conditions.
Generally speaking, predictability is (more or less) possible at global level and impossible at local ones.
It also swiftly diminish into the future. However “… recent developments in self-organization models and nonlinear thermodynamics have attracted attention to the opposite phenomenon: microscopically deterministic systems that behave in a completely unpredictable way when considered from a macroscopic viewpoint. Examples are the so-called ”deterministic chaos“ and certain types of cellular automata whose local dynamical rules are completely deterministic but for which there is no global algorithm allowing to predict their overall evolution without computing all the individual, microscopic transitions from the given initial state”. (F. HEYLIGHEN, 1989, p. 378; also S. WOLFRAM, 1984).
However, these systems are only globally (but not “completely”) unpredictable: they would have a global vicinity of behavior, at least until a bifurcation makes them cross a stability threshold, changing their nature by emergence, or destroying them.
According to P. DAVIES:“…the study of chaos has revealed how it is possible to reconcile the complexity of a physical world displaying haphazard and capricious behaviour with the order and simplicity of underlying laws of nature” (1990, p.51).
However: “The key feature of a chaotic process concerns the way that predictive errors evolve with time” (Ibid., p.49), i. e. the way they rapidly increase and practically destroy predictability“.