Garrett Baker

I have a long and confused love-hate relationship with the field of complex systems. People there never want to give me a simple, straightforward explanation about what its about, and much of what they say sounds a lot like woo ("edge of chaos" anyone?). But it also seems to promise a lot! This from the primary textbook on the subject: > The present situation can be compared to an archaeological project, where a mosaic floor has been discovered and is being excavated. While the mosaic is only partly visible and the full picture is still missing, several facts are becoming clear: the mosaic exists; it shows identifiable elements (for instance, people and animals engaged in recognizable activities); there are large patches missing or still invisible, but experts can already tell that the mosaic represents a scene from, say, Homer’s Odyssey. Similarly, for dynamical complex adaptive systems, it is clear that a theory exists that, eventually, can be fully developed. Of course, that textbook never actually described what the mosaic it thought it saw actually was. The closest it came to was: > More formally, co-evolving multiplex networks can be written as, ddtσi(t)∼F(Mαij,σj(t)) ddtMαij∼G(Mβij(t),σj(t)).(1.1) [...] The second equation specifies how the interactions evolve over time as a function G that depends on the same inputs, states of elements and interaction networks. G can be deterministic or stochastic. Now interactions evolve in time. In physics this is very rarely the case. The combination of both equations makes the system a co-evolving complex system. Co-evolving systems of this type are, in general, no longer analytically solvable. Which... well... isn't very exciting, and as far as I can tell just describes any dynamical system (co-evolving or no). The textbook also seems pretty obsessed with a few seemingly random fields: * Economics * Sociology * Biology * Evolution * Neuroscience * AI * Probability theory * Ecology * Physics * Chemistry