Related papers: What Isn't Complexity?
This paper deals with the arrow of complexification of engineering. We claim that the complexification of engineering consists in (a) that shift throughout which engineering becomes a science; thus it ceases to be a (mere) praxis or…
Researchers have proposed that the distinction between so-called "simple" and "complex" societies can be expressed by an increase in the number of levels at which functional organization, interaction, and thus selection, operate. In spite…
Explaining how and why some species evolved to have more complex social structures than others has been a long-term goal for many researchers in animal behavior because it would provide important insight into the links between evolution and…
We define a notion of complexity, which quantifies the nonlinearity of the computation of a neural network, as well as a complementary measure of the effective dimension of feature representations. We investigate these observables both for…
Our binary intuitive understanding of life and lifelikeness is good enough for daily life, but not for research in the natural sciences. Here we propose an operational definition of lifeness of a particular entity as a scalar, product of…
Economic transformation -- change in what an economy produces -- is foundational to development and rising standards of living. Our understanding of this process has been propelled recently by two branches of work in the field of economic…
In contrast to entropy, which increases monotonically, the "complexity" or "interestingness" of closed systems seems intuitively to increase at first and then decrease as equilibrium is approached. For example, our universe lacked complex…
In this paper we examine the concept of complexity as it applies to generative and evolutionary art and design. Complexity has many different, discipline specific definitions, such as complexity in physical systems (entropy), algorithmic…
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…
We address the problem of the relative importance of the intrinsic chaos and the external noise in determining the complexity of population dynamics. We use a recently proposed method for studying the complexity of nonlinear random…
Written language is complex. A written text can be considered an attempt to convey a meaningful message which ends up being constrained by language rules, context dependence and highly redundant in its use of resources. Despite all these…
Integrative Complexity (IC) is a psychometric that measures the ability of a person to recognize multiple perspectives and connect them, thus identifying paths for conflict resolution. IC has been linked to a wide variety of political,…
One of the most compelling problems in science consists in understanding how living systems process information. After all, the way they process information defines their capacities to learning and adaptation. There is an increasing…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
The possibility that evolutionary forces -- together with a few fundamental factors such as thermodynamic constraints, specific computational features enabling information processing, and ecological processes -- might constrain the logic 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…
A defining property of complex systems is that they have multiscale structure. How does this multiscale structure come about? We argue that within systems there emerges a hierarchy of scales that contribute to a system's causal workings. An…
Plasticity is a fundamental property of complex systems, such as the brain or an organism. Yet it typically remains a descriptive concept inferred retrospectively from observed outcomes, such as modifications in activity or morphology.…
Prediction of events is the challenge in many different disciplines, from meteorology to finance; the more this task is difficult, the more a system is {\it complex}. Nevertheless, even according to this restricted definition, a general…