Essays and speculations about Complex Systems, Adaptation, Learning, Evolution, and Artificial Intelligence, inspired by the book Complexity by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Several of the projects on this website were inspired by the book Complexity: The Emerging Science At The Edge Of Order And Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop.

The book is an understandable and exciting account of how a group of scientists discovered that some of the difficult problems in their fields of study, ranging from economics to physics to biology, seemed to have underlying similarities. The group's desire for a collaborative multi-disciplinary investigation into the similarities led to the founding of the Santa Fe Institute.

Their field of research came to be known as the study of "complex adaptive systems".

What is a Complex Adaptive System?

What the book refers to as "complexity" is the study of complex adaptive systems. Such systems are not necessarily complex in the sense of being complicated (as the unfortunate use of the word "complexity" would seem to imply). Instead, complex refers to their being composite, compound, comprised of multiple components (agents) acting independently. Complex adaptive systems are composite adaptive systems or compound adaptive systems, but they are not necessarily "complicated adaptive systems".

A population of these independent agents exhibits a collective group behavior. Over time, the individual component agents do not adapt or evolve. They merely survive or they don't. However, as a result of some of them surviving and others not, the composition of their population changes over time, which causes their collective group behavior to change.

This change in the collective group behavior, in the behavior of the system, is called 1) adaptation, 2) learning, or 3) evolution, depending on the context and depending on what type of entity the group is, but the underlying process for all of them is the same, and the process is a universal one, operating within compound systems living and nonliving, physical and even nonphysical (such as in thought and culture).

The essays

While reading the book and developing the programming projects inspired by it, I built a document with commentary, speculations, project notes, plans, and assorted facts for browsing through to get new ideas and inspiration.

I think it has some interesting ideas in it, but it's badly organized and only some sections have a readable flow. A rewrite and reorganization is underway.

These are its sections. (This current page is Intro. The next page is Learning):

Intro  Learning  Patterns  Real Life  Genetics  Classifiers  Biology  Neural Nets  Connectionism  Life  AI

New additions

So far, I've extracted and rewritten the following into organized and readable articles:

Responses to issues raised in Complexity Chapter 8 - Waiting for Carnot:

• Why does evolution seem to trend toward greater complexity?
• Does evolution have any direction? Where is it going? What will it lead to?
• Complicated systems are not inherently better than simple ones.
• What does "survival of the fittest" mean? What is fitness?

Download

Contains the original source document in a variety of formats, but it is now permanently out of date compared to the web pages.

Complex.zip (Complex.doc in multiple formats), 765 KB, contains:

• complex.doc (Microsoft Word 2003). Its Normal font of Times New Roman 14-point might be easier on the eyes. This original has some formatting that didn't translate perfectly to HTML in the various web page translation versions.
• complex60.doc (Microsoft Word 6.0). One small diagram was removed for 6.0 compatibility, but otherwise it's the same as the 2003 version.
• complex.mht (single-file web page to view with browser)
• complex.rtf (for WordPad)
• complex.xml

Partial bibliography

I found these books interesting, useful, inspiring, and/or educational:

• Complexity: The Emerging Science At The Edge Of Order And Chaos, by M. Mitchell Waldrop. Referred to herein as "Complexity".
   
• Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Referred to herein as "GEB".
   
• Chaos: Making A New Science, by James Gleick
   
• Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics Of Chaos, by Ian Stewart.
   
• Chaos Under Control: The Art And Science Of Complexity, by David Peak and Michael Frame. Referred to herein as "CUC".
   
• Artificial Intelligence Using C: The C Programmer's Guide To AI Techniques, by Herbert Schildt.

My To Do list

• There are some long speculations that may be obsolete or unlikely to lead anywhere. Locate and delete them.
• Search "DNA", and move the various miscellaneous notes to biology.doc, and make coherent and organized.
• For each of the subdocuments, move text that deals generally with the topic back to complex.doc, leaving behind the technical notes specific to that program.