"Rushkoff, Douglas - Cyberia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rushkoff Douglas)

equations: After you get an answer, you plug it back into the original equation again and
again, countless times. This is why computers have been so helpful in working with these
equations. The properties of these circular equations are stunningly different from those of
traditional linear equations. The tiniest error made early on can amplify into a tremendous
mistake once the equation has been iterated'' thousands of times. Think of a wristwatch that
loses one second per hour. After a few days, the watch is only a minute or so off. But after
weeks or months of iterating that error, the watch will be completely incorrect. A tiny change
anywhere in a fractal will lead to tremendous changes in the overall system. The force
causing the change need not be very powerful. Tremendous effects can be wrought by the
gentlest of "feedbacks.''
Feedback makes that loud screeching sound whenever a microphone is brought close
to its own speaker. Tiny noises are fed back and iterated through the amplification system
thousands of times, amplified again and again until they are huge, annoying blasts of sound.
Feedback and iteration are the principles behind the now-famous saying, When a butterfly
flaps its wings in China, it can cause a thunderstorm in New York.'' A tiny action feeds back
into a giant system. When it has iterated fully, the feedback causes noticeable changes. The
idea has even reached the stock market, where savvy investors look to unlikely remote
feedbacks for indications of which way the entire market might move once those tiny
influences are fully iterated. Without the computer, though, and its ability to iterate equations,
and then to draw them as pictures on a screen, the discovery of fractals would never have
been possible.
Mandelbrot was at IBM, trying to find a pattern underlying the random, intermittent
noise on their telephone lines, which had been causing problems for their computer modems.
The fact that the transmission glitches didn't seem to follow many real pattern would have
rendered a classical mathematician defenseless. But Mandelbrot, looking at the chaotic
distribution of random signals, decided to search for signs of self-similarity--that is, like the
coastline of beach, would the tiny bursts between bursts of interference look anything like the
large ones? Of course they did. Inside each burst of interference were moments of clear
reception. Inside each of those moments of clear reception were other bursts of interference
and so on. Even more importantly, the pattern of their intermittency was similar on each
level.
This same phenomenon--self-similarity--can be observed in many systems that were
previously believed to be totally irregular and unexplainable, ranging from the weather and
the economy to the course of human history. For example, each tiny daily fluctuation in the
weather mirrors the climatic record of the history of the planet. Each major renaissance in
history is itself made up of smaller renaissance events, whose locations in time mirror the
overall pattern of renaissances throughout history. Every chaotic system appears to be
adhering to an underlying order of self-similarity.
This means that our world is entirely or interdependent than we have previously
understood. What goes on inside any one person's head is reflected, in some manner, on every
other level of reality. So any individual being, through feedback and iteration, has the ability
to redesign reality at large. Mandelbrot had begun to map the landscape of Cyberia.

It Is the Mind of God
The terrace of the Applied Sciences Building overlooks what students at University of
California at Santa Cruz call Elf Land''--a dense section of woods where psychedelically
enhanced humans meet interdimensional beings. Back in the corridor of the building, posters
of computer-generated fractal images depicting the "arithmetic limits of iterative nonlinear
equations'' line the walls. The pictures nearest the terrace look like the ferns on the floor of
the forest. The ones farther back look more like the arrangements of the trees above them.