Sublime

What’s really happening within each city is a massive exchange of information across social and economic networks of people and organizations, all taking place on a complex infrastructural landscape of buildings, roads, pipes, and wires. For the most part there is no maestro; the properties of cities emerge from countless interactions of millions o

"thinking is a type of computation, DNA is software, evolution is an algorithmic process." Soon enough, he argued, human beings would begin to imagine all of biology as an instantiation of computer logic.

It seems that, from the perspective of mathematical science, there exist two natural domains. The first is the physical domain of particles, fields, and universal laws, with an associated search for elegant theories that apply everywhere in the known universe. Here, science has made great strides. The second domain is that of complex phenomena. The

that people—or, if you like, automata, algorithms—can and do act in situations that are not well defined.

I have used the word ‘computers’ for the mechanisms that execute gene programs inside living cells, but that is slightly loose terminology. Compared with the general-purpose computers that we manufacture artificially, they do more in some respects and less in others.

Gleick’s Chaos and Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control.