BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

CHAOS (Computability of) 5)

← Back

Acording to R. JENSEN: "Another manifestation of the unpredictability of chaotic dynamical systems is that the time-evolution is computationally irreducible. There is no faster way of finding how a chaotic system will evolve than to watch its evolution. The dynamical system itself is its own computer" (1987, p.179).

However, we can nevertheless compute reliable odds or probabilities for the outcome of these processes (i.e. for example football, or soccer games or turbulent flows). As a consequence probabilistic and statistical theories provide a natural description of average properties of chaotic systems".

"… Since simple models can yield complex, irregular behavior, we can actually hope to develop theoretical descriptions of a wide variety of apparently random, unpredictable natural phenomena using mathematical models which exhibit deterministic chaos" (Ibid).

Hence, the paradoxic situation appears wherein determinism can be partly described from a random base, but never in a such precise way as to allow for rigorous prediction.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

We thank the following partners for making the open access of this volume possible:

© 2020 BCSSS Contact/Imprint