Related papers: What Makes a System Complex? an Approach to Self-O…
Diversity is a fundamental feature of ecosystems, even when the concept of ecosystem is extended to sociology or economics. Diversity can be intended as the count of different items, animals, or, more generally, interactions. There are two…
A set of general physical principles is proposed as the structural basis for the theory of complex systems. First the concept of harmony is analyzed and its different aspects are uncovered. Then the concept of reflection is defined and…
We analyse the complexity of environments according to the policies that need to be used to achieve high performance. The performance results for a population of policies leads to a distribution that is examined in terms of policy…
Nature's many complex systems--physical, biological, and cultural--are islands of low-entropy order within increasingly disordered seas of surrounding, high-entropy chaos. Energy is a principal facilitator of the rising complexity of all…
Underlying complex systems, there is a rich web of interconnected components that determine the relational properties of the system. Yet, traditional methods used in education sciences often disregard the underlying complexity of the…
Equilibrium is a rather ideal situation, the exception rather than the rule in Nature. Whenever the external or internal parameters of a physical system are varied its subsequent relaxation to equilibrium may be either impossible or take…
The universal concept of complexity by the dynamic redundance paradigm and the ensuing concept of extended dynamic fractality (physics/9806002) are applied here to higher levels of complexity corresponding to living systems. After recalling…
Emergence, the phenomena where a system's micro-scale dynamics facilitate the development of non-trivial, informative higher scales, has become a foundational concept in modern sciences, tying together fields as diverse as physics, biology,…
This paper proposes a variational approach to describe the evolution of organization of complex systems from first principles, as increased efficiency of physical action. Most simply stated, physical action is the product of the energy and…
A common trait of complex systems is that they can be represented by means of a network of interacting parts. It is, in fact, the network organisation (more than the parts) what largely conditions most higher-level properties, which are not…
The increasing interest in complex networks research has been a consequence of several intrinsic features of this area, such as the generality of the approach to represent and model virtually any discrete system, and the incorporation of…
Topological effects produce chaos in multiagent simulation and distributed computation. We explain this result by developing three themes concerning complex systems in the natural and social sciences: (i) Pragmatically, a system is complex…
Human and artificial organizations may be described as networks of interacting parts. Those parts exchange data and control information and, as a result of these interactions, organizations produce emergent behaviors and purposes -- traits…
The emergence of a complex, large-scale organisation of cosmic matter into the Cosmic Web is a beautiful exemplification of how complexity can be produced by simple initial conditions and simple physical laws. In the epoch of Big Data in…
The word "complexity" is most often used as a meta--linguistic expression referring to certain intuitive characteristics of a natural system and/or its scientific description. These characteristics may include: sheer amount of data that…
This paper proposes a model of decision-making under uncertainty in which an agent is constrained in her cognitive ability to consider complex acts. We identify the complexity of an act according to the corresponding partition of state…
We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do…
The network concept is increasingly used for the description of complex systems. Here we summarize key aspects of the evolvability and robustness of the hierarchical network-set of macromolecules, cells, organisms, and ecosystems. Listing…
One of the basic frameworks in science views behavioral products as a process within a dynamic system. The mechanism might be seen as a representation of many instances of centralized control in real time. Many real systems, however,…
Evolutionary complexity is here measured by the number of trials/evaluations needed for evolving a logical gate in a non-linear medium. Behavioural complexity of the gates evolved is characterised in terms of cellular automata behaviour. We…