[FRIAM] Lyapunov Exponent

[Owen Densmore]

At yesterday's FRIAM, I mentioned the Chaos has the luxury of  
reasonably formal techniques, much lacking in Complexity.  My point  
was that there was an "inclusion principal" for chaos .. a way to  
partition processes into those that are chaotic and those that are  
not.  And naturally, neither set is null.

The technique used in Chaos is the Lyapunov exponent:
   http://hypertextbook.com/chaos/43.shtml
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_exponent

A similar measure, as far as I know, is not available for description  
of Complex systems .. one that offers a solution to the inclusion  
principal for Complex processes.

BTW: We were having difficulty remembering the name of the author of  
one of the more popular books.  I believe we were searching for  
Robert Devaney.  He is editor of the Studies in Nonlinearity series  
of books, which includes a rather interesting one by Brian Davies  
which has a wonderful set of Java applications/applets for exploring  
chaos .. a sort of lab if you will.

     -- Owen

Owen Densmore
http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org