Hastings clearly has more experience with chaos theory than I do (I upvoted his comment). I’m hoping that my rather simplistic grasp of the field might result in a simpler-to-understand answer (that’s still basically correct).
Chaos theory is a branch of math; it characterizes models (equations). If your model is terrible, it can’t help you. What the theory tells you is how wildly your model will react to small perturbations.
AFAIK the only invention made possible by chaos theory is random number generators. If a system you’re modeling is extremely chaotic, you can use its output for random numbers with confidence that nobody will ever be able to model or replicate your system with sufficient precision to reproduce its output.
Hastings clearly has more experience with chaos theory than I do (I upvoted his comment). I’m hoping that my rather simplistic grasp of the field might result in a simpler-to-understand answer (that’s still basically correct).
Chaos theory is a branch of math; it characterizes models (equations). If your model is terrible, it can’t help you. What the theory tells you is how wildly your model will react to small perturbations.
AFAIK the only invention made possible by chaos theory is random number generators. If a system you’re modeling is extremely chaotic, you can use its output for random numbers with confidence that nobody will ever be able to model or replicate your system with sufficient precision to reproduce its output.
That wasn’t well phrased. Oops.