RUNAWAY EVENT
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 2910 ▶ |
| Object type | General information, Methodology or model |
A giant fluctuation in a composite system.
Examples of this type of events are catastrophic earthquakes, snow and ice avalanches, population pandemics or stock market crashes.
Runaway events are unfrequent and quite difficult to predict.
Composite systems are generally chaotic and thus deterministic only in a very global sense, while subject to random-like behavior in time.
In P. BAK and K. CHEN terms: “In chaotic systems a small initial uncertainty grows exponentially with time. Furthermore, as one attempts to make predictions, further and further in the future, the amount of information one needs to gather about the initial conditions increases exponentially. For the most part, this exponential growth prevents long-term predictions”(1991, p.32).
A runaway event generally leads to a catastrophe discontinuity.
See also
Power laws