chaos

A property of some non-linear dynamic systems which exhibit

sensitive dependence on initial conditions. This means that

there are initial states which evolve within some finite time

to states whose separation in one or more dimensions of state

space depends, in an average sense, exponentially on their

initial separation. Such systems may still be completely

deterministic in that any future state of the system depends

only on the initial conditions and the equations describing

the change of the system with time. It may, however, require

arbitrarily high precision to actually calculate a future

state to within some finite precision.

["On defining chaos", R. Glynn Holt

[email protected] and D. Lynn Holt

[email protected].

]

Fixed precision floating-point arithmetic, as used by most

computers, may actually introduce chaotic dependence on

initial conditions due to the accumulation of rounding errors

(which constitutes a non-linear system).

(1995-02-07)