Chaos Part of 3/31 mputer. He wanted to study how weather pat | Blinkist Summary Book

Chaos
Part of 3/31

mputer. He wanted to study how weather patterns change over time. And he stumbled on something deeply unsettling.
Lorenz’s weather simulation was pretty simple – it didn’t even have clouds. Conditions like temperature and airstream were represented by numbers. To study how they behaved over time Lorenz would pick one of those variables and print out a graph that plotted its fluctuations.
One day in 1961 he wanted to rerun a simulation from the day before. But he decided to start in the middle of the simulation typing in the numbers from the previous printout by hand.
At the beginning the second simulation behaved just like the first. But then the variables’ behavior started deviating. As simulated time went on they got more and more out of sync. Finally the motion of the second graph looked totally different from the first.
What caused this massive incongruity? Lorenz had typed in the numbers from the previous simulation only up to the third decimal point. For airstream for instanc