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Say you have conditions A, B, and C.

You want them all to be at a certain threshold, but if you increase A, C decreases. Change B, and both A and C change. The factors are linked to each other. I'm wondering if there's a term for this type of situation.

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    Sort of chain reaction or domino effect*?
    – user 66974
    Commented Jan 27, 2018 at 21:34
  • I feel like that implies a series of events that happens in order, while I'm looking for something to describe a noun - an object that has dependent factors, and is difficult to solve because of it.
    – wkw
    Commented Jan 27, 2018 at 22:05
  • These are simply dependent factors.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jan 27, 2018 at 23:21
  • I can't put my tongue to a word. I might use compound for a quality close to what you describe, "compound knot of a puzzle" ? Here are some more words (3 pages, this is the middle) related to labyrinthine thesaurus.com/browse/labyrinthine/2 .. also "knotty" alone has it's merits
    – Tom22
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 3:36
  • It's a Chernobyl puzzle.
    – Nigel J
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 6:37

2 Answers 2

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It’s an optimisation problem.

In mathematics and computer science, an optimization problem is the problem of finding the best solution from all feasible solutions. - wikipedia

It’s not enough to modify one of the parameters - the puzzle requires all the parameters to be ‘tuned’ in concert to get the global ‘best’ answer.

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I think your question is reminiscent of Nash equilibria, a concept from game theory. The only difference being that such an equilibrium is normally defined by a number of players who each have a strategy.

If you would view each of your conditions A, B and C as sets of strategies then your current combination of conditions is a Nash equilibrium if you cannot get a better outcome by merely changing the strategy of one of A, B and C.

Wikipedia lists both formal and informal definitions for the Nash equilibrium, I will quote the first part from the informal one:

Informally, a strategy profile is a Nash equilibrium if no player can do better by unilaterally changing his or her strategy.

Attribution: "Nash Equilibrium." Wikipedia. April 20, 2018. Accessed April 28, 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium#Informal_definition.

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