Related papers: Complexity
In their position paper entitled "Towards a new, complexity science of learning and education", Jorg et al. (2007) argue that educational research is in crisis. In their opinion, the transdisciplinary and interdiscursive approach of…
The intuition that a long history is required for the emergence of complexity in natural systems is formalized using the notion of depth. The depth of a system is defined in terms of the number of parallel computational steps needed to…
The complexity of a system, in general, makes it difficult to determine some or almost all matrix elements of its operators. The lack of accuracy acts as a source of randomness for the matrix elements which are also subjected to an external…
A general notion of information-related complexity applicable to both natural and man-made systems is proposed. The overall approach is to explicitly consider a rational agent performing a certain task with a quantifiable degree of success.…
The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace. And it has changed in a much more fundamental way than one would think, primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. Every new product, every…
We define a novel quantitative strategy inspired by the ecological notion of nestedness to single out the scale at which innovation complexity emerges from the aggregation of specialized building blocks. Our analysis not only suggests that…
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…
A system's apparent simplicity depends on whether it is represented classically or quantally. This is not so surprising, as classical and quantum physics are descriptive frameworks built on different assumptions that capture, emphasize, and…
A measure of complexity based on a probabilistic description of physical systems is proposed. This measure incorporates the main features of the intuitive notion of such a magnitude. It can be applied to many physical situations and to…
A qualitatively new, much more liberal and efficient organisation of science is proposed and justified, in connection with growing debate about further role and development of fundamental science. Although the key ideas can be explained…
A strong link between complexity theory and literature is possible, i.e. feasible, under one proviso, namely that total novels be considered. However, neither in literature at large nor in complexity science has been literature seriously…
In this note we advocate the notion of variety as juxtaposed to the notion of complexity. Laminar flows are complex, turbulence is various. When the gradients reach a critical point, laminar flows are subjected to instabilities and…
This article addresses broad trends in interdisciplinary research in physics where interactions with colleagues in fields such as computer science, ecology, or economics can often be derailed by unintentional clashes of methodologies and…
Complexity is a measure of information content. Crystalline materials are not complex systems because their structures can be represented tersely using the language of crystallography. Disordered materials are also structurally simple if…
The century of complexity has come. The face of science has changed. Surprisingly, when we start asking about the essence of these changes and then critically analyse the answers, the result are mostly discouraging. Most of the answers are…
Why life is complex and --most importantly-- what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, "is screaming to be answered but seldom is even…
Complex macroscopic behaviour can arise in many-body systems with only very simple elements as a consequence of the combination of competition and inhomogeneity. This paper attempts to illustrate how statistical physics has driven this…
Depth is a complexity measure for natural systems of the kind studied in statistical physics and is defined in terms of computational complexity. Depth quantifies the length of the shortest parallel computation required to construct a…
This document is both a synthesis of current notions about complex systems, and a practical approach description. A disambiguation is proposed and exposes possible reasons for controversies related to causation and emergence. Theoretical…
This review examines complexity science in Heliophysics, describing it not as a discipline, but as a paradigm. In the context of Heliophysics, complexity science is the study of a star, interplanetary environment, magnetosphere, upper and…