[Fire Servant]

I'm looking for a word or term that denotes the fertile border region between chaos and order, where you get interesting complexity.

I need this for a story I'm writing.

I could've sworn I heard or read this term before, but I can't seem to find it. I believe it comes from chaos theory or the study of complex systems.

Anyone?

[PeteMC]

Best I could find was this:

"According to Larsen-Freeman (1997), languages go through periods of chaos and order, and their creative growth occurs at the border between these two, a region between order and complete randomness or chaos, where the complexity is maximal. This borderline between chaos and order has been termed the edge of chaos by Waldrop (1992, cited in, Finch , 2001)."

CHAOS / COMPLEXITY THEORY IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, Nasrin HADIDI TAMJID

The full paper is here if you can face it : http://novitasroyal.org/tamjid.pdf

[Fire Servant]

Thanx Pete...

Maybe that's what I'm thinking of. But I thought there was something shorter and more technical sounding. Then again I think I would've found it by now, having tried every conceivable google search..

[Window Bar]

A decade ago, James Gleick wrote a wonderful book titled Chaos. I've long since passed it off to friends, who have passed it to other friends, so I can't refer to it. But, if memory serves, edge of chaos is the term. If used as an adjective, you could go with edge-of-chaos, but I'm stumped with finding any single word.

--WB

[Expendable]

Are you looking for "nexus"?

[Fire Servant]

I read 'Chaos' about ten years ago myself. But I read or heard this term I'm looking for more recently.

It wouldn't be a nexus so much as a narrow range on the chaos/order continuum where interesting complexity (or computation) might arise.

'Edge of chaos' seems to be the answer. I keep coming back to it. So that's what I'll go with for now.

(Powerful aliens are toying with humans in my story. One wants to keep them orderly, another wants to let them go to war, for the entertainment value.The latter invokes 'edge of chaos' in arguing for Its position. It is bored, is looking for something surprising or emergent to happen...)

[MrBF1V3]

You might be looking for the term Catastrophe. I read a book on Catastrophe Theory some years ago, and it was the term used by that author for the place where intuitive and reasonable ends and is replaced by inevitable. It explains why the stock market can crash, or how wind can gust. There were also some very cool 3D and 4D graphs to illustrate.

You might want to call it "the point of catastrophe".

Just a thought.

B5

[tjwell01]

Organized chaos.

[hippokrene]

You'd think maximal complexity would be far to the ordered side. Where chaos and order meet, you'd get simplicity.

[Fire Servant]

@ MrBF ... Thanks for the suggestion. I think I know what you mean, having read about the idea in other contexts (avalanches? points of no return in bad decision making in a survival situation?) It's related to what I seek, but I'm not quite sure it would denote that border region I mentioned.

@ Hippokrene ... You'd think, right? But in the sense we're talking about here (evolution, computation, interesting or useful emergent properties) you actually get maximal complexity in between chaos and order. The idea being that if the system is too orderly it stagnates. If too chaotic, it's just noise.

That's how I read it, anyway.