So this all-in-one pool table has air hockey, and ping-pong and can also convert into a dining table you could enjoy lunch on! The player can win a frame by scoring the most points by pocketing the red and colored balls with the cue ball. Potting the red object balls is worth 3 points. The game starts with the cue ball being struck by the player to pot a red ball, followed by potting a colored ball. During play, when a player cannot hit the ball that the rules require him to hit (because of obstruction by another ball or balls), he is said to be snookered and loses his turn; this situation gives the game its name. You have to hit an object ball first, what is billiards after which the order of striking the cushions and the other ball does not matter. You do not have to pocket the balls sequentially provided you hit the lowest numbered ball first.

No matter how consistent you are with the first shot (the break), the smallest of differences in the speed and angle with which you strike the white ball will cause the pack of billiards to scatter in wildly different directions every time. The rate at which these tiny differences stack up provides each chaotic system with a prediction horizon - a length of time beyond which we can no longer accurately forecast its behaviour. The smallest of differences are producing large effects - the hallmark of a chaotic system. Though the dance of the planets has a lengthy prediction horizon, the effects of chaos cannot be ignored, for the intricate interplay of gravitation tugs among the planets has a large influence on the trajectories of the asteroids. It was the first chaotic system to be discovered, long before there was a Chaos Theory. Lorenz had found the seeds of chaos. Once this computer program was up and running, Lorenz could produce long-term forecasts by feeding the predicted weather back into the computer over and over again, with each run forecasting further into the future.

One day, Lorenz decided to rerun one of his forecasts. Accurate minute-by-minute forecasts added up into days, and then weeks. Two weeks is believed to be the limit we could ever achieve however much better computers and software get. Ceres, the solar system's largest asteroid, has less than 1/40,000th the mass of Earth; the Moon, a mere 1/80th. These objects are the heaviest you're likely to find - there are heavier moons and entire planets you could consider using, but to be honest from this point of view it looks more like using a succession of hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of smaller asteroid impacts would be a better bet. In phase space, a stable system will move predictably towards a very simple attractor (which will look like a single point in the phase space if the system settles down, or a simple loop if the system cycles between different configurations repeatedly).

The behaviour of the system can be observed by placing a point at the location representing the starting configuration and watching how that point moves through the phase space. Phase space is not (always) like regular space - each location in phase space corresponds to a different configuration of the system. A chaotic system will also move predictably towards its attractor in phase space - but instead of points or simple loops, we see "strange attractors" appear - complex and beautiful shapes (known as fractals) that twist and turn, intricately detailed at all possible scales. The branch of fractal mathematics, pioneered by the French American mathematician Benoît Mandelbröt, allows us to come to grips with the preferred behaviour of this system, even as the incredibly intricate shape of the attractor prevents us from predicting exactly how the system will evolve once it reaches it. In 1887, the French mathematician Henri Poincaré showed that while Newton’s theory of gravity could perfectly predict how two planetary bodies would orbit under their mutual attraction, adding a third body to the mix rendered the equations unsolvable. The game is different from the other two.