EXAMPLE 16 Chaos in Your Laptop

Does a computer always do what it is supposed to? How could your laptop computer be chaotic?

The Intel i5 chip common in many computers has 731 million transistors. They are subject to physical laws and environmental conditions, and they don’t all always respond in the same amount of time to do their commanded tasks. Researchers have found that running the same program (of several billion instructions) repeatedly under identical conditions can take greatly varying amounts of time. However, for some programs, the pattern of times displays clear evidence of mathematical chaos.