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

RUNAWAY EVENT 1)2)

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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.

→ Power laws

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]

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