Please no butterfly analogies.
In: Mathematics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Demonstrating_Chaos_with_a_Double_Pendulum.gif
This gif probably shows it best. Three double pendulums, starting at almost exactly the same state, will have wildly different speeds and locations only a few seconds in.
Chaos theory, in a nutshell, is the study of how such systems behave, including but not limited to:
* When/how fast such systems diverge (for example, the pendulum example is mostly similar for the first few seconds)
* When they *don’t* diverge (because many chaotic systems only have regions where it is chaotic; going back to the pendulum, 3 pendulums starting close to the bottom obviously is not chaotic)
* How strongly such systems diverge, with respect to differences in the starting condition
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