Complex Systems

This book explores the exciting new field of complexity. It features in-depth coverage of important theoretical areas, including fractals, chaos, nonlinear dynamics, artificial life, and self organization. It also provides overviews of complexity in several applied areas, including parallel computation, control systems, neural systems, and ecosystems. Contributors examine some of the properties that best characterize complex systems, including algorithmic richness, nonlinearity, and abundant interactions between components. In this way the book draws themes, especially the ideas of connectivity and natural computation, that reveal deep, underlying similarities among phenomena that have formerly been treated as completely distinct. Researchers in a wide array of fields, including ecology, neuroscience, computer science, and mathematics, will find this volume to be a fascinating collection of ideas.

The new science of complex systems concerns the ways in which the world is put together. How, for example, do interactions between millions of neurons form the working human brain? Complex Systems provides the first in-depth overview of this important new field. It covers both essential theory, such as fractals and chaos, as well as applications to physics, engineering and ecology. The idea of 'natural computation' is a major unifying theme, as the book shows with accounts of artificial life, cellular automata, neural networks and genetic algorithms.