An Exploratory Study of the Butterfly Effect Using Agent- Based Modeling

This paper provides insights about the behavior of chaotic complex systems, and the sensitive dependence of the system on the initial starting conditions. How much does a small change in the initial conditions of a complex system affect it in the long term? Do complex systems exhibit what is called the "Butterfly Effect"? This paper uses an agent-based modeling approach to address these questions. An existing model from NetLogo© library was extended in order to compare chaotic complex systems with near-identical initial conditions. Results show that small changes in initial starting conditions can have a huge impact on the behavior of chaotic complex systems.