Notes

Chapter 7: Mechanisms in Programs and Nature

Section 4: Chaos Theory and Randomness from Initial Conditions


Instability [and chaos theory]

Sensitive dependence on initial conditions is associated with a kind of uniform instability in systems. But vastly more common in practice is instability only at specific critical points—say bifurcation points—combined with either intrinsic randomness generation or randomness from the environment. (Note that despite its widespread use in discussions of chaos theory, this is also what usually seems to happen with the weather; see page 1177.)



Image Source Notebooks:

From Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science [citation]