In the zone

[Dave Meury]

Motivated by Terrance's musings on chaos, I submit the following quote
from an article I recently read on complex systems with regard to
economies and market behavior.  The description, of course, is
applicable to a much wider range of topics.

"Successful complex adaptive evolutionary systems (CAE systems) are
dynamic but not chaotic.  The participants learn to achieve a safe
distance from both rigidity and chaos and how to escape from a chaotic
mode should they temporarily fall into one.  The 'state space' in which
a successful CAE system spends most of its time is often called 'the
edge of chaos' which might just as well be called 'the zone of fruitful
turbulence' because, in the case of CAE systems, it is not an edge at
all but resembles a constantly shifting zone of creativity and struggle,
fuzzily bounded by chaos on one hand and stagnation on the other."
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