Reverse Butterfly Effect: Saving Alternate Histories of Virtual Worlds

Chaos theory is a recent field of study which has become extremely influential in science and in popular culture. Chaos theory deals with complex, non‐linear systems which are extremely sensitive to their initial conditions (commonly known as the butterfly effect), and whose behaviour quickly become unpredictable over short periods of time. Despite their seemingly random nature, chaotic systems are fully deterministic. This means that the same initial conditions will always yield the same future states. When I looked at the butterfly effect backwards, and applied it to computer simulations, the result was a way to store many alternate histories of virtual worlds in a very small amount of data. This time storage model may have applications in scientific simulation, gaming, and cryptography, and provides a different look at chaos theory.