How does computational irreducibility differ from chaos theory?

Chaos is about sensitivity to initial conditions: tiny differences in the starting state blow up, so you would need infinitely precise inputs to predict far ahead. Computational irreducibility is a different obstacle — even with the exact rule and exact starting state known perfectly, there is still no shortcut that reaches step N in substantially fewer than N steps, so you must actually run the computation. [setup] In Wolfram's framing the limit isn't measurement precision but the amount of computational work the process inherently requires; this is an interpretive stance carried over from A New Kind of Science rather than a settled theorem about nature.