Related papers: Complexity
This is an essay about understanding complexity science, via some peculiarities of the field, as a meeting place for a special kind of scientist. It comes out of my hobby of reading popular-science complex systems books, and builds on notes…
The evolution of complexity has been a central theme for Biology and Artificial Life (Bonner, 1988; Bedau et al., 2000). Complexification has been interpreted in different ways: as a process of diversification between evolving units…
Recently it has been argued that entropy can be a direct measure of complexity, where the smaller value of entropy indicates lower system complexity, while its larger value indicates higher system complexity. We dispute this view and…
Information complexity is the interactive analogue of Shannon's classical information theory. In recent years this field has emerged as a powerful tool for proving strong communication lower bounds, and for addressing some of the major open…
A measure called Physical Complexity is established and calculated for a population of sequences, based on statistical physics, automata theory, and information theory. It is a measure of the quantity of information in an organism's genome.…
In the 21st century, many of the crucial scientific and technical issues facing humanity can be understood as problems associated with understanding, modelling, and ultimately controlling complex systems: systems comprised of a large number…
The main result is that: function descriptions are not made equal, and they can be categorised in at least two categories using various computational methods for function evaluation. The result affects Kolmogorov complexity and Random…
We discuss views about whether the universe can be rationally comprehended, starting with Plato, then Leibniz, and then the views of some distinguished scientists of the previous century. Based on this, we defend the thesis that…
In this chapter, a statistical measure of complexity is introduced and some of its properties are discussed. Also, some straightforward applications are shown.
In the first part of this paper, we present a unified framework for analyzing the algorithmic complexity of any optimization problem, whether it be continuous or discrete in nature. This helps to formalize notions like "input", "size" and…
Confusion and disagreement around the notion of time is due to the fact that we often fail to recognize that we call 'time' a variety of distinct notions, only partially related to one another. Many apparently obvious properties of time are…
Simplicity is held by many to be the key to general intelligence. Simpler models tend to "generalise", identifying the cause or generator of data with greater sample efficiency. The implications of the correlation between simplicity and…
Data complexity is an important concept in the natural sciences and related areas, but lacks a rigorous and computable definition. In this paper, we focus on a particular sense of complexity that is high if the data is structured in a way…
We define {\em semantic complexity} using a new concept of {\em meaning automata}. We measure the semantic complexity of understanding of prepositional phrases, of an "in depth understanding system", and of a natural language interface to…
While looking for abductive explanations of a given set of manifestations, an ordering between possible solutions is often assumed. The complexity of finding/verifying optimal solutions is already known. In this paper we consider the…
The theory of computational complexity focuses on functions and, hence, studies programs whose interactive behavior is reduced to a simple question/answer pattern. We propose a broader theory whose ultimate goal is expressing and analyzing…
It may happen that for a certain abductive problem there are several possible explanations, not all of them mutually compatible. What explanation is selected and which criteria are used to select it? This is the well-known problem of the…
In resolving instances of a computational problem, if multiple instances of interest share a feature in common, it may be fruitful to compile this feature into a format that allows for more efficient resolution, even if the compilation is…
This chapter does not deal with specific tools and techniques for managing complex systems, but proposes some basic concepts that help us to think and speak about complexity. We review classical thinking and its intrinsic drawbacks when…
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…