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.

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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.

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CHAOS (Deterministic) 1)2)

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Unpredictability in a globally deterministic system.

Systems affected by deterministic chaos are nonlinear and have a high sensitivity to initial conditions.

Generally speaking, predictability is (more or less) possible at global level and impossible at local ones.

It also swiftly diminish into the future. However "… recent developments in self-organization models and nonlinear thermodynamics have attracted attention to the opposite phenomenon: microscopically deterministic systems that behave in a completely unpredictable way when considered from a macroscopic viewpoint. Examples are the so-called "deterministic chaos" and certain types of cellular automata whose local dynamical rules are completely deterministic but for which there is no global algorithm allowing to predict their overall evolution without computing all the individual, microscopic transitions from the given initial state". (F. HEYLIGHEN, 1989, p. 378; also S. WOLFRAM, 1984).

However, these systems are only globally (but not "completely") unpredictable: they would have a global vicinity of behavior, at least until a bifurcation makes them cross a stability threshold, changing their nature by emergence, or destroying them.

According to P. DAVIES:"… the study of chaos has revealed how it is possible to reconcile the complexity of a physical world displaying haphazard and capricious behaviour with the order and simplicity of underlying laws of nature" (1990, p.51).

However: "The key feature of a chaotic process concerns the way that predictive errors evolve with time" (Ibid., p.49), i. e. the way they rapidly increase and practically destroy predictability".

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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