Predicting a system’s final outcome from its initial state is the ultimate goal for many physicists. In certain complex systems, however, this goal is thwarted by chaos, where even the subtlest tweaks to the initial state can lead to completely different fates, making the system almost impossible to predict.

In research published in Nature Communications, Illinois physicists developed a model showing that unpredictability can also arise in nonchaotic systems. Despite being fully deterministic, the team’s model resists computational attempts to predict its final state based on its initial configuration.

Remarkably, however, the scientists found that the model’s dynamics give rise to topological structure that can eventually be used as a reliable predictor of final fate, demonstrating that predictability itself can emerge over time.