The Butterfly Effect

A few days back, I had crashed upon a movie of the same title. An average Hollywood fare starring Ashton Kutcher, who is more famous for his illustrious dating partner, Demi Moore, the movie chronicled the life of a troubled teenager who tries to correct some of the follies committed in his childhood by employing a supernatural technique. He seemingly goes through his memoir to undertake a telekinetic journey to specific periods of his past in order to re-enact the situations. In trying to do so, he finds the flow of his life drastically rearranged as he lands up in different events other than those he was ever subject to in the normal course.

Quite fascinated by the concept, but strictly not by the corrosive storyline and the ludicrous screenplay, I tried to concentrate more on the realities behind the apparently mesmerizing “Butterfly Effect”. This theory finds its roots in the convoluted ravines of the Chaos Theory. The guardians of the erstwhile concept define the butterfly effect as the propensity of a system to be sensitive to initial conditions. With the passage of time, they become highly erratic and undergo sharp changes oblivious to any definitive prediction existing elsewhere. The saying goes that a butterfly flapping its wings in some corner of the world gives rise to a tornado in another place. Highly interesting!!

Well, having said that, I must confess that the bespectacled seers concentrating on theorems and formulae in the academically adorned interiors of an exalted university are equally perplexed at the seeming diffidence of the aforementioned concept. Moreover, the nonchalant weatherman finds the answers pretty intimidating too. If a natural system alters its way abruptly to deploy different phenomena as opposed to the anticipated ones, the effect will be mind-blowing. Supercomputers are used to forecast weather and come up with various models to simulate understandable behaviour. Several models run collaterally and the ones demonstrating homogeneous results are primarily accepted. It’s an altogether different story regarding the “battle of Teraflops” wherein IBM-Blue Gene, NEC-Earth Simulator and NASA are busy outsmarting each other to showcase their supercomputing prowess. I really doubt whether the butterfly effect is a dominating inspiration to them.

Jokes aside, the concept is not confined to the precincts of meteorology, but addresses issues in other fields as well. One of the most interesting observations made comes from the field of fluid mechanics. If a tap is opened slowly, the single drops of water create just a small splash only to give rise to a laminar appearance as the flow increases. It’s interesting to note that transition of a state to another is sudden, unpredictable and confusing. As it may appear so, randomness governs the behaviour of the system to culminate in utter chaos. Take for instance a simple case involving the population of rabbits and foxes. The evergreen predator-prey system is a legitimate sample obeying the laws of the butterfly effect. If the foxes are small in number, the rabbit population thrives. But there’s an unassuming catch to it. As the rabbit population increases, the foxes have plenty of food, so they can hunt, survive and reproduce to put their own population on the incline. Now, as there are a larger number of foxes, the rabbit population is bound to decrease. An extremely captivating phenomenon, this catch-22 sibling tends to conform to a steady state or equilibrium, wherein one of the species may have to face the guillotine.

Business processes too can be modelled along similar lines. The perennially taxing resource allocation strategies in any corporate body seem to desperately search for a state of equilibrium. An increase in demand would most certainly ask for more resources, which may be fewer in number. But, as more resources are scouted for and properly allocated to appease the demand equation, the demand would be fulfilled, momentarily though, as a surplus of resources could give rise to newer demand.

That’s the inescapable lure of the Butterfly Effect…