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.

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CHAOS (Weak) 1)2)

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Characteristic of a composite system which "evolves on the border of chaos" (P. BAK & K. CHEN, 1991,p.32)

These authors state: "This behavior… is a result of self-organized criticality. Weak chaos differs significantly from fully chaotic behavior. Fully chaotic systems are characterized by a time scale beyond which it is impossible to make predictions. Weakly chaotic systems lack such a time scale and so allow long term predictions" (p.32).

This seems somehow debatable. From one part so-called "full chaos" seems to maintain for extremely long periods a measure of global determinism. On the other hand, even on base of a known flicker noise some uncertainty (growing with time) always remains as to when a runaway event or percolation process may appear. It must be conceded however that a stock market or a population crash is creating the conditions that impede another stock market crash or population crash. The percolation event destroys the global cluster that it has built… but leaves open the possibility of reconstruction of another cluster.

Compare with "ergodicity"

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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