Oxford University Press (2009)
Abstract |
What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive questions that the science of complexity seeks to answer. In this remarkably accessible and companionable book, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate, detailed tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. Comprehending such systems requires a wholly new approach, one that goes beyond traditional scientific reductionism and that re-maps long-standing disciplinary boundaries. Based on her work at the Santa Fe Institute and drawing on its interdisciplinary strategies, Mitchell brings clarity to the workings of complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that apply to all of them. She explores as well the relationship between complexity and evolution, artificial intelligence, computation, genetics, information processing, and many other fields. Richly illustrated and vividly written, Complexity : A Guided Tour offers a comprehensive and eminently comprehensible overview of the ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for the field's contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our time.
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Keywords | Complexity (Philosophy |
Categories | (categorize this paper) |
Buy this book | $19.95 new (17% off) $23.95 from Amazon Amazon page |
Call number | Q175.32.C65.M58 2009 |
ISBN(s) | 0195124413 9780195124415 0199798109 |
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Citations of this work BETA
Robustness, Reliability, and Overdetermination (1981).William C. Wimsatt - 2012 - In Characterizing the Robustness of Science. pp. 61-78.
Complexity and Information: Measuring Emergence, Self‐Organization, and Homeostasis at Multiple Scales.Carlos Gershenson & Nelson Fernández - 2013 - Complexity 18 (2):29-44.
What Is Complex/Emotional About Emotional Complexity?Raul Berrios - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
Informative Ecological Models Without Ecological Forces.Justin Donhauser - 2020 - Synthese 197 (6):2721-2743.
Complexity and Language Contact: A Socio-Cognitive Framework.Albert Bastardas-Boada - 2017 - In Salikoko Mufwene, F. Pellegrino & C. Coupé (eds.), Complexity in language. Developmental and evolutionary perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 218-243.
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