chaos and the LGP-30

wrcooke at wrcooke.net wrcooke at wrcooke.net
Sat Jul 25 08:26:05 CDT 2020


The LGP-30 has been discussed here (often fondly) a few times so I thought this might be of interest.  Adds a bit of fame to the little guy that I wasn't aware of.

I was reading the wikipedia web page on chaos theory and found this passage:

"Edward Lorenz was an early pioneer of the theory. His interest in chaos came about accidentally through his work on weather prediction in 1961.[12] Lorenz was using a simple digital computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30, to run his weather simulation. He wanted to see a sequence of data again, and to save time he started the simulation in the middle of its course. He did this by entering a printout of the data that corresponded to conditions in the middle of the original simulation. To his surprise, the weather the machine began to predict was completely different from the previous calculation. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#History

Will


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