Strange Attractors
“Imagine a beach. At one end is a pier and the other is a rocky point. Two ice cream vendors arrive to sell their wares and decide to locate themselves so they are equidistant from the pier, the point and one another. By pure chance, vendor A gets the first group of customers. So as not to miss out on business, vendor B moves a bit closer to vendor A. Now vendor B has customers, so vendor A decides to move closer to vendor B. Over time they creep toward each other until they are both side by side. The resulting cluster is called the attractor. They are not attracted to a particular grain of sand in the middle of the beach. Rather, their interaction results in the attractor pattern forming.”
…if you ask anyone without a background in complexity science, ‘what is an attractor?’ their likely response is: ‘anything that attracts.’ A complexity scientist, however, might say: “an attractor is the pattern which forms from the interaction of many connected entities.”
The attractor for a complexity scientist is the result not the cause.
Related
The attractor is not a force of attraction or a goal-oriented presence
Social atomism, Identity & natural numbers
Identity in human systems is a strange attractor (to take a key concept from complexity theory). We have historically understood two types of attractor: a point attractor characterised by a pendulum and a limit cycle attractor where activity oscillates between different stable states. Complexity theory has given us a third, strange attractor often characterised by the Lorenz Butterfly. To quote Juarrero “All attractors represent characteristic behaviours or states that tend to draw the system towards themselves, but strange attractors are ‘thick’, allowing individual behaviours to fluctuate so widely that even when captured by the attractor’s basin they appear unique” and “Strange attractors describe ordered global patterns with such a high degree of local fluctuation, that is, that individual trajectories appear random, never quite exactly repeating….” A critical point to realise is that a strange attractor comes into being through evolution not design.
- Dave Snowden
Superbugs, strange attractors and resilience
Point Attractors sometimes illustrated by a pendulum which settles to a single point, or water sloshing around a bowl which will end up at the lowest point.
Limit Cycle Attractors where the system oscillates in respect of position and velocity, repeating periodically.
Strange Attractors which is an evolutionary form of the system itself which permits high degrees of individual behaviour and in which the end point is always different.
…
All the things that the formal systems did not handle she did. Gradually our trainee nurse would rise through the ranks and one day discovered that she was the Matron and people were now afraid of her. The institution was not formed by diktat of management, it had evolved and the practices and expectations had evolved around it. In other words the Matron was in complexity terms a strange attractor
When the Matron was abolished as a role it was done without real depth of inquiry…For the consultants and civil servants looking at the health service the Matron was a surplus level of management that could be engineered out of the system. Their questions looked for formal function rather than organising principles and the matrons only knew what they knew when they needed to know it so they could not volunteer information outside the context of its use.
The message from this is that its critical to know the attractor (and especially the strange attractor) mechanisms in play before you attempt an major organisational and social change.
- Dave Snowden
The Attractor
It is important to understand that the attractor is not imposed on the system from an external source. It is the chemical reaction itself, or more precisely the mechanism or chemical force field, that creates the attractor – and, even more to the point, it is our body which creates the attractors that govern the rhythms of our lives.
- Raima Larter
The Lorenz butterfly is significant becasue it illustrates the concept of “sensitive dependence upon initial conditions.”
Approximate the starting conditions; you can’t replicate them anyway
(Source: anecdote.com.au)
