A state that a
system settles into after a certain amount of time. For example, if you drop a marble into a bowl, it will roll around at first, but eventually settle on the bottom of the bowl. A
limit cycle is a type of attractor where the system never settles down, but eventually ends up in a state that it has been in before, and hence continues on in an
infinite loop. An example of this would be a
planet in a
perfectly stable orbit that keeps on tracing out the same path forever. A
strange attractor is when a system never ends up in the same state twice, but eventually the set of possible states that the system can be in is confined to a limited area of
phase space. The classic example of this is the
Lorenz Attractor.