混沌

A phase portrait is a way to visualise the recurrence, or not,of a system’s behaviour, in a series of orbits including one orbit to which the system will finally arrive. In figure 2, we can see the phase portrait for a pendulum, without any friction or air resistance being exerted on it, which shows a very simple attractor (a circle). However, a pendulum which loses energy due to friction will eventually come to a complete stop, so the attractor is a fixed point attractor (figure 3), where the pendulum does not move (both speed and distance are zero). There are other attractors as well (such as loop or tori attractors), but most of the attractors of plain, predictable systems are simple.

An attractor for three different pendulums swinging without friction or air resistance

A fixed point attractor

分阶段地描述是使得系统的变化重现过程可视化地方法之一，或者说系统的这种过程，是一系列的轨道，包括系统最终到达的轨道。在图2中，我们可以看到分阶段描述的钟摆运动，没有任何外力作用，也没有空气阻力的影响，最终呈现出来的是一个非常简单的自吸引字(一个圆)。但是这个钟摆会由于阻力而能量耗尽，最终达到完全的停止，因此这个吸引子是一个混合吸引子(图三)，这个钟摆不再摆动(速度和位移均为0)。还有一些别的吸引子，例如环和环面吸引子，但是大多数吸引子还是平滑的，可而预测的系统吸引子同时也是简单的。

处于三个不同位置的没有外力或者空气阻力的钟摆的吸引子(图二)

混合吸引子(图三)