A fascinating look at the exciting new sciences of complexity and what they reveal about everything from ant colonies to the World Wide Web, now availablein paperback What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? In this remarkably clear and companionable book, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactionsamong myriad individuals. Based on her work at the Santa Fe Institute and drawing on its interdisciplinary strategies, Mitchell brings clarity to the workings of complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that applyto all of them. Richly illustrated, Complexity: A Guided Tour--winner of the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science--offers a wide-ranging overview of the ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for its contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our time. PrefaceAcknowledgmentsPart I: Background and HistoryChapter 1: What is Complexity?Chapter 2: Dynamics, Chaos, and PredictionChapter 3: InformationChapter 4: ComputationChapter 5: EvolutionChapter 6: Genetics, SimplifiedChapter 7: Defining and Measuring ComplexityPart II: Life and Evolution in ComputersChapter 8: Self-Reproducing ProgramsChapter 9: Genetic AlgorithmsPart III: Computation Writ LargeChapter 10: Cellular Automata, Life, and the UniverseChapter 11: Computing with ParticlesChapter 12: Information Processing in Living SystemsChapter 13: How to Make Analogies (If You Are A Computer)Chapter 14: Prospects of Computer ModelingPart IV: Network ThinkingChapter 15: The Science of NetworksChapter 16: Applying Network Science to Real-World NetworksChapter 17: The Mystery of ScalingChapter 18: Evolution, ComplexifiedPart V: ConclusionChapter 19: The Past and Future of the Sciences of ComplexityNotesBibliographyIndex
- ISBN: 978-0-19-979810-0
- Editorial: Oxford University
- Encuadernacion: Rústica
- Páginas: 368
- Fecha Publicación: 24/11/2011
- Nº Volúmenes: 1
- Idioma: Inglés