- #1
Darryl
- 126
- 5
The Butterfly Effect,
"The butterfly effect is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. Small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dyna
mical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
I was always under the belief that this Effect resulted from weather forcast supercomputers, where they changed the input values by the "amount of the beating of a butterfly's wing", and after running the simulation on computer simulation created a cyclone, and the other did not.
Does anyone really think this occures in the real world, or is this just indicating the limitations of complex systems (weather) with computers.
I would think information theory and sampling rate theory would indicate that to be able to accurately simulate a complex system you would need i very high percentage of sample points. Possibly EVERY point in the system needs to be sampled.
If you start a simulation with a very small sample data set, (mabey a few thousand measurements of temp, wind speed, pressure and so on). that you will always get very different specific results, and only and 'estimation' of what the system is doing. ?
so is the Butterfly effect a real world effect, or just an indication of the limitations in measuring complex systems. (such as long term weather forcasting).
(why is a Quantum leap, considered big ?? )
"The butterfly effect is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. Small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dyna
PHP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
I was always under the belief that this Effect resulted from weather forcast supercomputers, where they changed the input values by the "amount of the beating of a butterfly's wing", and after running the simulation on computer simulation created a cyclone, and the other did not.
Does anyone really think this occures in the real world, or is this just indicating the limitations of complex systems (weather) with computers.
I would think information theory and sampling rate theory would indicate that to be able to accurately simulate a complex system you would need i very high percentage of sample points. Possibly EVERY point in the system needs to be sampled.
If you start a simulation with a very small sample data set, (mabey a few thousand measurements of temp, wind speed, pressure and so on). that you will always get very different specific results, and only and 'estimation' of what the system is doing. ?
so is the Butterfly effect a real world effect, or just an indication of the limitations in measuring complex systems. (such as long term weather forcasting).
(why is a Quantum leap, considered big ?? )