The price of chaos

In a recent newsletter, we mentioned the “Butterfly effect”, which is in turn strictly interconnected with the chaos theory. The butterfly effect, as an underlying principle of chaos, describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state (“a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas”).

Therefore, since I am starting to read two books written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (“The Black Swan”, about how unpredictable and unexpected events can change our world, and “Antifragile”, which should offer some hope to build systems a bit more resilient to such events), I went online and did some simple research about such theories.

According to Wikipedia chaos theory is an interdisciplinary scientific theory and branch of mathematics focused on underlying patterns and deterministic laws, of dynamical systems, that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, that were once thought to have completely random states of disorder and irregularities. Chaos theory states that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, interconnectedness, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, and self-organization.

Chaos theory concerns deterministic systems whose behavior can, in principle, be predicted. Such chaotic systems are…