Gopher presents a menu list from which a text document or another resource can be chosen. The answers can be found in three common features shared by most chaotic systems. Chaos Theory is a delicious contradiction - a science of predicting the behaviour of "inherently unpredictable" systems. Lorenz had found the seeds of chaos. Lorenz soon realised that while the computer was printing out the predictions to three decimal places, it was actually crunching the numbers internally using six decimal places. Some systems flip this premise around, with orderly effects emerging out of turbulent and chaotic causes. Although the computer’s new predictions started out the same as before, the two sets of predictions soon began diverging drastically. The best we can do for three bodies is to predict their movements moment by moment, and feed those predictions back into our equations … In 1887, the French mathematician Henri Poincaré showed that while Newton’s theory of gravity could perfectly predict how two planetary bodies would orbit under their mutual attraction, adding a third body to the mix rendered the equations unsolvable.

Explainer: what is Chaos Theory? Though the dance of the planets has a lengthy prediction horizon, the effects of chaos cannot be ignored, for the intricate interplay of gravitation tugs among the planets has a large influence on the trajectories of the asteroids. In the case of the weather, the prediction horizon is nowadays about one week (thanks to ever-improving measuring instruments and models). Welcome to one of the most marvellous fields of modern mathematics. A difference of one part in a thousand: the same sort of difference that a flap of a butterfly’s wing might make to the breeze on your face. And how can we tell the difference between pure randomness and orderly patterns that are cloaked in chaos? What at first glance appears to be random behaviour is completely deterministic - it only seems random because imperceptible changes are making all the difference. Snobol: a programming language used from the 1960's to the 1980's. Speed Coding: the second scientific programming language, created by Seldon and John Backus of International Business Machines in 1953. SGML, Standard Generalised Mark-up Language: the basic standard from which most mark-up languages are derived. RPG, Report Programme Generator: a programming language created by IBM in 1964, used mainly to write reports.

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), another standard of characters, which can be read by humans or can also be executed as a programme, through another programme that will act as a translator or as an interpreter (for example, a user agent for Hyper Text Mark-up Language). Other chip producing companies were Fairchild, Texas Instruments (these two had begun earlier than Intel), Motorola, MOS Technology, Zilog, Signetics, Mostek, National, Hewlett-Packard, AMD, Cyrix and Nexgen, all of them North American. The smallest of differences are producing large effects - the hallmark of a chaotic system. No matter how consistent you are with the first shot (the break), what is billiards the smallest of differences in the speed and angle with which you strike the white ball will cause the pack of billiards to scatter in wildly different directions every time. A nice way to see this "butterfly effect" for yourself is with a game of pool or billiards.

This was initially a 7ft 3 in 1 pool table and now its a 7ft 4 in 1 pool table! The large rectangular table typically is twice as long as it is wide. The starting weather conditions had been virtually identical. In the interests of saving time he decided not to start from scratch; instead he took the computer’s prediction from halfway through the first run and used that as the starting point. Once this computer program was up and running, Lorenz could produce long-term forecasts by feeding the predicted weather back into the computer over and over again, with each run forecasting further into the future. He created a mathematical model which, when supplied with a set of numbers representing the current weather, could predict the weather a few minutes in advance. Terse: a programming language created by Jim Neil in the 1980's, operable since 1996. Terse gives all of the control that is available in assembly language, with the often easier use that is found in high level languages. Fortran, Formule Translator: one of the first scientific languages, created in 1954-1956 by John Backus of International Business Machines and by others, for the computer IBM 704. It is focused on the resolution of mathematical problems of many kinds.