Stable attractor

A stable attractor in chaos theory or biology is an equilibrium state into which a system settles until disrupted by a change in the environment. The system then settles to a new attractor.

In cellular automata a transition from a chaotic phase to a stable attractor is called a solution.

Some mathematical functions may never converge to a solution, but may cycle endlessly in a stable way.

Leibnitz et al. have devised a network routing scheme on a stable attractor model developed to account for the response of Escherichia coli bacteria to variations in nutrient availability. Information about data paths (bandwidth, transit time) is used to determine a stable attractor and to find a new attractor if the network falters. The system is stable in noisy environments[1].

References

  1. ^ Leibnitz, Kenji; Wakamiya, Naoki and Murata, Masayuki (March, 2006). "Biologically inspired self-adaptive multi-path routing in overlay networks". Communications of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) 49 (3): 62–67. doi:10.1145/1118178.1118203. ISSN 0001-0782.