Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

an autocatalytic set was an economy—a submicroscopic economy that extracted raw materials (the primordial “food” molecules) and converted them into useful products (more molecules in the set).

a complex adaptive system has many levels of organization, with agents at any one level serving as the building blocks for agents at a higher level.

system that is complex, in the sense that a great many independent agents are interacting with each other in a great many ways.

complex, self-organizing, adaptive systems possesses a kind of dynamism that makes them qualitatively different from static objects

network of many “agents” acting in parallel.

The cluster of rules forming a default hierarchy is essentially synonymous with what Holland calls an internal model. We use weak general rules with stronger exceptions to make predictions about how things should be assigned to categories:

The McKinsey team would stay with a company for five or six months or more, studying a very complicated set of arrangements, until somehow certain patterns became clear. We’d all sit around on the edge of our desks and someone would say, ’This must be happening because of that,’ and someone else would say, ‘Then that must be so.’ Then we’d go out a

Fallen logs rot—but trees also grow. So how do you reconcile this growth of structure with the second law of thermodynamics?

There is no general-purpose procedure that can scan the code and the input and give you the answer any faster than that.