Related papers: Why Monotonous Repetition is Unsatisfying
Natural code is known to be very repetitive (much more so than natural language corpora); furthermore, this repetitiveness persists, even after accounting for the simpler syntax of code. However, programming languages are very expressive,…
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…
Complex spatiotemporal patterns in nature significantly challenge reductionism-based modern science. The lack of a paradigm beyond reductionism hinders our understanding of the emergence of complexity. The diversity of countless patterns…
The problem of Turing pattern formation has attracted much attention in nonlinear science as well as physics, chemistry and biology. So far all Turing patterns have been observed in stationary and oscillatory media only. In this letter we…
Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…
Disorder and noise in physical systems often disrupt spatial and temporal regularity, yet chaotic systems reveal how order can emerge from unpredictable behavior. Complex networks, spatial analogs of chaos, exhibit disordered, non-Euclidean…
The Multiscale Law of Requisite Variety is a scientific law relating, at each scale, the variation in an environment to the variation in internal state that is necessary for effective response by a system. While this law has been used to…
This essay is a picaresque -- a first-person narrative relating the adventures of a rogue (me) sifting through the mind of Christopher Alexander as he left behind formalized design thinking in favor of a more intuitive, almost spiritual…
From atomic crystals to bird flocks, most forms of order are captured by the concept of spontaneous symmetry breaking. This paradigm was challenged by the discovery of topological order, in materials where the number of accessible states is…
Rhythmic activities that alternate between coherent and incoherent phases are ubiquitous in chemical, ecological, climate, or neural systems. Despite their importance, general mechanisms for their emergence are little understood. In order…
Complexity of patterns is a key information for human brain to differ objects of about the same size and shape. Like other innate human senses, the complexity perception cannot be easily quantified. We propose a transparent and universal…
Ordered mechanical systems typically have one or only a few stable rest configurations, and hence are not considered useful for encoding memory. Multistable and history-dependent responses usually emerge from quenched disorder, for example…
We evoke the idea of representation of the chaotic attractor by the set of unstable periodic orbits and disclose a novel noise-induced ordering phenomenon. For long unstable periodic orbits forming the strange attractor the weights (or…
Uniquely among primates, humans possess a remarkable capacity to recognize and manipulate abstract structure in the service of task goals across a broad range of behaviors. One illustration of this is in the visual perception of geometric…
Simonton (2006) makes the unwarranted assumption that nonmonotonicity supports a Darwinian view of creativity. Darwin's theory of natural selection was motivated by a paradox that has no equivalent in creative thought: the paradox of how…
Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do…
Instead of static entropy we assert that the Kolmogorov complexity of a static structure such as a solid is the proper measure of disorder (or chaoticity). A static structure in a surrounding perfectly-random universe acts as an interfering…
As Christopher Alexander conceived and defined through his life's work - The Nature of Order - wholeness is a recursive structure that recurs in space and matter and is reflected in human minds and cognition. Based on the definition of…
We propose a method to procedurally generate a familiar yet complex human artifact: the city. We are not trying to reproduce existing cities, but to generate artificial cities that are convincing and plausible by capturing developmental…
Discovered by Christopher Alexander, living structure is a physical phenomenon, through which the quality of the built environment or artifacts can be judged objectively. It bears two distinguished properties just like a tree: "far more…