Guidance on the control of chaos

Edward Lorenz expressed the extreme sensitivity of chaotic systems to perturbations by suggesting that the weather could be changed by a disturbance as tiny as the wingbeat of a butterfly. This is not to say that informed weather forecasters worry about the movements of butterflies – there are, in the global weather system, much larger scale phenomena which completely dominate the "butterfly effect". Nevertheless, it is true that sensitivity to small perturbations is the fundamental property of chaotic systems which accounts for their complex, irregular behaviour even in the absence of large disturbances.