Complexity: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

This perpetual novelty, produced with a limited number of rules or laws, is a characteristic of most complex systems:

adaptive interaction, where interacting agents (as in markets or the Prisoner’s Dilemma) modify their strategies in diverse ways as experience accumulates.

But how are plausible new hypotheses generated? 7.

‘more is different’ (also discussed in Waldrop’s classic,

real markets involve diverse traders of bounded rationality, with different agents employing different strategies.

Building blocks come into play at this point. It has been observed that innovation in CAS is mostly a matter of combining well-known components in new ways.

distinctive property called emergence, roughly described by the common phrase ‘the action of the whole is more than the sum of the actions of the parts’.

Herbert Simon, in his classic book The Sciences of the Artificial, outlined the challenges posed by complex systems; he did this so well that, half a century later, the major points apply directly to current research: one might conjecture there has been a long-run trend toward variety and complexity. … forms can proliferate because the more complex

‘fat-tailed’ behaviour, where rare events (e.g. mass extinctions and market crashes) occur much more often than would be predicted by a normal (bell-curve) distribution