We use computers a lot in our lives. We can use it to surf the Internet, talk to our friends and families, watch videos, listen to music, and many more. Thanks to these computers, the massive digital information around us becomes arranged and organized, thereby creating order, and creating order is what computers are good at. But computers are not perfect; they can’t do everything. One such thing that they can’t do is the opposite of order — disorder, or more appropriately, chaos. It’s too… chaotic for them.
It's beyond the ability of digital computers to reliably reproduce the behavior of chaotic systems, researchers say.
Scientifically speaking, chaotic systems are "dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions." In popular culture, that sensitivity is best known as the butterfly effect.
“Our work shows that the behavior of the chaotic dynamical systems is richer than any digital computer can capture," says Peter Coveney, Director of the University College London Center for Computational Science and the study's coauthor, in a press statement. "Chaos is more commonplace than many people may realize and even for very simple chaotic systems, numbers used by digital computers can lead to errors that are not obvious but can have a big impact. Ultimately, computers can’t simulate everything."
Know more about this “chaotic” study over at Popular Mechanics.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
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old, wow i used to like this site until i realized everything that comes here is all old news