Quick look: applications of chaos theory

By Elizabeth @ 2024-08-19T14:07 (+16)

This is a crosspost, probably from LessWrong. Try viewing it there.

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Arturo Macias @ 2024-08-23T06:32 (+1)

Chaos (as much as the second principle of thermodynamics and the efficient market hypothesis) is mostly a negative result. It is a wall, that the scientist has to face, not a tool.

It is not very surprising that there are not “applications”. More generally, principles about complex systems are useful in a fuzzy way.

What are the applications of Darwin evolution? Perhaps all modern biology, perhaps only genetic optimization algorithms. Difficult to say: it is huge and fuzzy.

Elizabeth @ 2024-08-24T20:33 (+2)

Evolution also came up over on my blog. Here's part of what I said there: 

  1. it made a bunch of facts weird where they previously hadn’t been, drawing attention to especially educational edge cases. This contributed to the discovery of plate tectonics, which does make strong predictions.
  2. Darwin’s insight wasn’t that you could breed for traits- everyone knew that, just like everyone knew apples fell when you dropped them. The insight was that this was the same process by which species formed/planets orbited, which let you share math between them. 
  3. Was a huge deal to Christianity and a major contributor to the secular revolution.
  4. Epidemiology
    • I personally predicted the endemic course of covid, from the beginning (evidence). I don’t consider this impressive and didn’t even think of it as a prediction at the time- I was just describing what naturally happens in these situations.
    • I’ve also predicted PEP/PreP resistant HIV and am mad no one is taking it seriously.
    • Evolutionary models helped inform the original HIV cocktail.
  5. It took more work, but we now can make predictions about how fast traits should evolve under selection. Biology is messy so these are often wrong, but that highlights that we haven’t found all the relevant factors.


 

SummaryBot @ 2024-08-19T15:42 (+1)

Executive summary: While chaos theory has been overhyped in some areas, it has had significant real-world applications in weather forecasting and fractals, though many commonly cited applications never achieved widespread use.

Key points:

  1. Chaos theory's applications in cryptography and random number generation are largely overstated.
  2. Medical applications like Approximate Entropy for anesthesia and fetal monitoring never achieved widespread adoption.
  3. Empirical Dynamical Modeling shows promise but remains unproven in practical applications.
  4. Weather forecasting has benefited substantially from chaos theory concepts, leading to probabilistic ensemble forecasting.
  5. Fractals have found practical applications in antenna design, mapping software, and telecommunications error management.
  6. The impact of chaos theory is often obscured by misleading PR and a focus on conceptual rather than mathematical contributions.

 

 

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