Related papers: Complexity
Complexity is often seen as a inherent negative in information design, with the job of the designer being to reduce or eliminate complexity, and with principles like Tufte's "data-ink ratio" or "chartjunk" to operationalize minimalism and…
Aesthetics, among other criteria, can be statistically examined in terms of the complexity required for creating and decrypting a work of art. We propose three laws of aesthetic complexity. According to the first law of aesthetic…
We argue that the coordination of the activities of individual complex agents enables a system to develop and sustain complexity at a higher level. We exemplify relevant mechanisms through computer simulations of a toy system, a coupled map…
The concept of effective complexity of an object as the minimal description length of its regularities has been initiated by Gell-Mann and Lloyd. The regularities are modeled by means of ensembles, that is probability distributions on…
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
Criticality has been proposed as a mechanism for the emergence of complexity, life, and computation, as it exhibits a balance between robustness and adaptability. In classic models of complex systems where structure and dynamics are…
We study the build up of complexity on the example of 1 kg matter in different forms. We start on the simplest example of ideal gases, and then continue with more complex chemical, biological, life and social and technical structures. We…
The relationship of scientific knowledge development to technological development is widely recognized as one of the most important and complex aspects of technological evolution. This paper adds to our understanding of the relationship…
The concept of complementarity, originally defined for non-commuting observables of quantum systems with states of non-vanishing dispersion, is extended to classical dynamical systems with a partitioned phase space. Interpreting partitions…
Cyberspace is being more and more tightly linked to the physical space and socioeconomic space to emerge a cyber-physical-socioeconomic space, where humans, machines and physical objects in the natural environment interact with each other,…
Understanding the origins of complexity is a fundamental challenge with implications for biological and technological systems. Network theory emerges as a powerful tool to model complex systems. Networks are an intuitive framework to…
Emergent patterns in complex systems are related to many intriguing phenomena in modern science and philosophy. Several conceptions such as weak, strong and robust emergence have been proposed to emphasize different epistemological and…
There is a widespread assumption that the universe in general, and the Earth's biosphere in particular, is becoming more complex over time. This paper formulates this assumption as a macroscopic law, the law of increasing complexity, for a…
This is a chapter in the Encyclopedia of Robotics. It is devoted to the study of complexity of complete (or exact) algorithms for robot motion planning. The term ``complete'' indicates that an approach is guaranteed to find the correct…
I try to clarify several confusions in the popular literature concerning chaos, determinism, the arrow of time, entropy and the role of probability in physics. Classical ideas going back to Laplace and Boltzmann are explained and defended…
The modern usage of the words astronomy and astrology is traced back to distinctions, largely ignored in recent scholarship. Three interpretations of celestial phenomena (in a geometric, a substantialist and a prognostic versions) coexisted…
A system of two initially homogeneous, physically real fields uniformly attracted to each other is considered as the simplest basis of the self-developing world structure. It is shown that the system is unstable against periodic cycles of…
The human mind is known to be sensitive to complexity. For instance, the visual system reconstructs hidden parts of objects following a principle of maximum simplicity. We suggest here that higher cognitive processes, such as the selection…
Context dependence is central to the description of complexity. Keying on the pairwise definition of "set complexity" we use an information theory approach to formulate general measures of systems complexity. We examine the properties of…
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…