Book Description

Complexity science has been a source of new insight in physical and social systems and has demonstrated that unpredictability and surprise are fundamental aspects of the world around us. This book is the outcome of a discussion meeting of leading scholars and critical thinkers with expertise in complex systems sciences and leaders from a variety of organizations, sponsored by the Prigogine Center at The University of Texas at Austin and the Plexus Institute, to explore strategies for understanding uncertainty and surprise. Besides contributions to the conference, it includes a key digest by the editors as well as a commentary by the late nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, "Surprises in half of a century". The book is intended for researchers and scientists in complexity science, as well as for a broad interdisciplinary audience of both practitioners and scholars. It will well serve those interested in the research issues and in the application of complexity science to physical and social systems.

Book Description
Effective organizational leaders need to understand the big picture. Effective leaders observe more carefully, diagnose more accurately, and understand more deeply. Navigating the subtleties of organizations, through the perspective of complex systems, is the focus of this book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

worth the read
The first half of this book can be read on either a personal or professional level; a light-weight read.The second half is more professional, but doesn't get bogged down with self-importance.

Interesting Book for the Novice
This is an interesting and well written book for the novice who wants to know more about thinking holistically. ... Read more

Book Description
It is now clear that the brain is unlikely to be understood without recourse to computational theories. The theme of An Introduction to Natural Computation is that ideas from diverse areas such as neuroscience, information theory, and optimization theory have recently been extended in ways that make them useful for describing the brain's programs. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the computational material that forms the underpinnings of the currently evolving set of brain models. It stresses the broad spectrum of learning models--ranging from neural network learning through reinforcement learning to genetic learning--and situates the various models in their appropriate neural context.

To write about models of the brain before the brain is fully understood is a delicate matter. Very detailed models of the neural circuitry risk losing track of the task the brain is trying to solve. At the other extreme, models that represent cognitive constructs can be so abstract that they lose all relationship to neurobiology. An Introduction to Natural Computation takes the middle ground and stresses the computational task while staying near the neurobiology. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Very informative - but you'll need an icepack for your head
Fifteen years ago I did research in this area and had just completed a math degree. I thought it would be interesting to get back up to speed.
I found the book fascinating, tremendous work has been done in this field and this is a good broad treatment of it. For anyone who is into computer science but has never studied the brain it will be a tremendous eye opener.
But boy, was it hard work. I found I had to read & re-read sections just to understand some of the math involved. In fairness the book does cover everything you need but if you have never done college level math, or you have forgotten most of it, then don't tackle this book when you are tired!

From Caltech
This book is one of the two main books used in Caltech's Neural Computation class (the other is Introduction to the Theory of Neural Computation by Hertz, Krogh, and Palmer).This book covers a wider spectrum of learning models than most books, including Hertz, et al.It is still fairly mathematically rigorous, although not as much as Hertz, et al.It is ideal for somebody who wants a fairly mathematically rigorous description of the subject, but also wants something more comprehensive than Herts, et al. ... Read more

Book Description
These sixty contributions from researchers in ethology, ecology, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and related fields delve into the behaviors and underlying mechanisms that allow animals and, potentially, robots to adapt and survive in uncertain environments. They focus in particular on simulation models in order to help characterize and compare various organizational principles or architectures capable of inducing adaptive behavior in real or artificial animals.

Jean-Arcady Meyer is Director of Research at CNRS, Paris. Stewart W. Wilson is a Scientist at The Rowland Institute for Science, Cambridge, Massachusetts. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume contains the courses given at the Sixth SummerSchool on Complex Systems held at the Faculty of Physical andMathematical Sciences, University of Chile at Santiago, Chile, 14-18December 1998.
The contributions, which in some cases have been structured assurveys, treat recoding Sturmian sequences on a subshift of finitetype chaos from order; Lyapunov exponents and synchronisation ofcellular automata; dynamical systems and biological regulations;cellular automata and artificial life; Kolmogorov complexity; andcutoff for Markov chains.
Audience: This book will be of interest to graduate students andresearchers whose work involves mathematical modelling and industrialmathematics, statistical physics, thermodynamics, algorithms andcomputational theory, statistics and probability, and discretemathematics. ... Read more

Book Description

This book describes the evolution of several socio-biological systems using mathematical kinetic theory. Specifically, it deals with modeling and simulations of biological systemscomprised of large populations of interacting cellswhose dynamics follow the rules of mechanics as well as rules governed by their own ability to organize movement and biological functions. The authors propose a new biological model for the analysis of competition between cells of an aggressive host and cells of a corresponding immune system.

Book Description
Can there be a science of consciousness? This issue has been the focus of three landmark conferences sponsored by the University of Arizona in Tucson. The first two conferences and books have become touchstones for the field. This volume presents a selection of invited papers from the third conference. It showcases recent progress in this maturing field by researchers from philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, phenomenology, and physics. It is divided into nine sections: the explanatory gap, color, neural correlates of consciousness, vision, emotion, the evolution and function of consciousness, physical reality, the timing of conscious experience, and phenomenology. Each section is preceded by an overview and commentary by the editors.

Contributors:
Dick J. Bierman, Jeffrey Burgdorf, A. Graham Cairns-Smith, William H. Calvin, Christian de Quincey, Frank H. Durgin, Vittorio Gallese, Elizabeth L. Glisky, Melvyn A. Goodale, Richard L. Gregory, Scott Hagan, C. Larry Hardin, C. A. Heywood, Masayuki Hirafuji, Nicholas Humphrey, Harry T. Hunt, Piet Hut, Alfred W. Kaszniak, Robert W. Kentridge, Stanley A. Klein, Charles D. Laughlin, Joseph Levine, Lianggang Lou, Shimon Malin, A. David Milner, Steven Mithen, Martine Nida-Rumelin, Stephen Palmer, Jaak Panksepp, Dean Radin, Steven Z. Rapcsak, Sheryl L. Reminger, Antti Revonsuo, Gregg H. Rosenberg, Yves Rossetti, Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Jonathan Shear, Galen Strawson, Robert Van Gulick, Frances Vaughan, Franz X. Vollenweider, B. Alan Wallace, Douglas F. Watt, Larry Weiskrantz, Fred A. Wolf, Kunio Yasue, Arthur Zajonc. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fish oblivious of ocean - the West's self-induced paradox
The third and final volume of these Tucson debates is considerably smaller than the mammoth Tucson II. It is as usual a mixed bag hitting a low with the incredible Science as the creation of Darwinian "just-so" story tautologies by psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. The vacuous neo-Darwinian argument that things are as they are as they had to evolve that way is repeated yet again by Humphrey for consciousness as if he has made some profound discovery!!!
If one can point to any progress over the course of these conferences in the mid-1990s it was that Tucson III ends with a final section on Phenomenology with eight chapters - the best of which is by B. Alan Wallace on Buddhist Phenomenology. Many of these chapters refer to the need to learn from Hindu/Buddhist yogic phenomenology (many New-Age types are very biased towards Tibetan Buddhism)and Husserlian phenomenology as the only way to really understand Consciousness with its transformations into different states of which mainstream Western philosophy and science are totally ignorant. But even these chapters often start well pointing out the deficiencies of Western approaches but then the authors' own models are themselves based on the same sort of culturally-limited assumptions which they had only moments earlier been criticising! It is truly hard to shake off indoctrinations! For instance, Laughlin holds to the Neuronal Man myth and views consciousness as some emergent phenomenon in central nervous systems with no ontological argument to justify his views. Harry Hunt tries to explain away the mystical Light in terms of Gibson's sensory optical array and reduce profound ontological claims to simple, trivial metaphors! The great mystics all assert that the Light is NOT a sensory phenomenon and sensory processes are stopped in deep mysticism!!! Jonathan Shear conflates Kant's Transcendental Unity of Apprehension or "Transcendental Ego" with the mystical Pure Consciousness when the yogic traditions make it clear that the Ego is not the same as the Deeper Self of the Pure Consciousness and that the subject/object duality disappears only when the Ego dissolves into the Light of Pure Consciousness!!!
In the first section on the "Explanatory Gap" Galen Strawson begins to appreciate the Neutral Monist panpsychist position but then refuses to budge from conceptions of "physical reality"- a term also used by Hameroff without any self-questioning. Only physicist Malin discussing Schrodinger's concept of Objectivation of Nature by Science and Whitehead's 'occasions' as "throbs" of experience (just like the Spanda (vibrations) of Nondual Kashmiri Shaivism) and astrophysicist Piet Hut who points out that we only know the outside ("physical") world as part of our internal subjective world and that a new metaphysical basis to science is needed begin to grasp that Objectivation is the despiritualization of Nature by abstraction and mistaking the concept for Reality itself!
Harry Hunt makes a good point as to what whether the conference is about a Science of Consciousness or moving toward a Spiritualization of Science. All this confusion stems from the Mind/Body dualism which, as Werner Heisenberg pointed out in Physics and Philosophy, permeates the whole of Western Thought. Its roots go well beyond Descartes to the Christian myth of Creatio ex nihilo in which Nature is created out of Absolute Nothing by an anthropomorphic God completely separate from Creation (i.e. Spirit/Nature dualism). To cut a long story short, no resolution of the problem of consciousness in the West will come till the universal Light Pure Consciousness (the No-thing-ness Plenum/Void)is understood as the Ground of All Being and the physical World as a manifestation through energetic vibrations. The Buddhist/Whiteheadian emphasis on the energetic vibrations as discontinuities ignoring the universal Ground also leads nowhere as in Christian de Quincey's strange contribution.
In fact, I had already identified the physical correlate of the inner Light of Pure Consciousness with the brainwaves of the Brainstem Reticular Activating system in 1994 (see my other reviews) so all this huff-and-puff and brouhaha at Tucson was like a lot of fish unaware of the ocean in which they were all swimming! See my The Oneness/Otherness Mystery and perhaps also Philosophy of Space and Time and the Inner Constitution of Nature by mathematical physicist and mystic Michael Whiteman(Heisenberg himself checked the chapter on Quantum Mechanics in this).
Sutapas Bhattacharya
... Read more

Book Description
The Internet may be viewed as a "complex system" with diverse features and many components that can give rise to unexpected emergent phenomena, revealing much about its own engineering. This book brings together chapter contributions from a workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute in March 2001. This volume captures a snapshot of some features of the Internet that may be fruitfully approached using a complex systems perspective, meaning using interdisciplinary tools and methods to tackle the subject area. The Internet penetrates the socioeconomic fabric of everyday life; a broader and deeper grasp of the Internet may be needed to meet the challenges facing the future.The resulting empirical data have already proven to be invaluable for gaining novel insights into the network's spatio-temporal dynamics, and can be expected to become even more important when tryin to explain the Internet's complex and emergent behavior in terms of elementary networking-based mechanisms. The discoveries of fractal or self-similar network traffic traces, power-law behavior in network topology and World Wide Web connectivity are instances of unsuspected, emergent system traits. Another important factor at the heart of fair, efficient, and stable sharing of network resources is user behavior. Network systems, when habited by selfish or greedy users, take on the traits of a noncooperative multi-party game, and their stability and efficiency are integral to understanding the overall system and its dynamics. Lastly, fault-tolerance and robustness of large-scale network systems can exhibit spatial and temporal correlations whose effective analysis and management may benefit from rescaling techniques applied in certain physical and biological systems. The present book will bring together several of the leading workers involved in the analysis of complex systems with the future development of the Internet. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Good book in some ways but also very odd
This book is quite odd in that if flicks between what sounds like a dotcom consulting company pre-2000 and then to a univeristy academic and then back again quite regularly. I'm sure the academic content of the theory is flawless but it's like the author is pretending to work in in industry when in fact he's never seen outside a university. This is perhaps unfair as there's a limited amount of the ESP/CEP literature out there but don't be fooled into believing this book will be of practical use to you if you're a developer in industry being pressured into one ESP/CEP system or another, though it should cerainly be food for thought if you'd like to consider more deeply past some of the commerical implementations of ESP/CEP. If you're a software architect with no deliverables this is probably right up your street.

Surprisingly boring to read
I tried to read this book.I have it on my book shelf and I can see it right now, but I really couldn't get past the introduction.For a supposedly technical book, the first chapter reads like a 1995 introduction to the 'information superhighway' and about how wonderful it will be.This sentence on page 9:
"Another example is automated trading Web sites, or "eMarketplaces" as they are called."

Then followed by the word "global eCommerce Web".It just reads like a bad commercial from IBM or BEA telling you how to 'accelerate your eCommerce to web speed'.

In theory the book should be good, but this kind of treatment really offends my technical sensibilities.

Finally an IT book with Meat!
If you are like me and you are frustrated after picking up an IT book and only getting superficial platitudes rather than keen insights, then you may be pleasantly surprised by this book because it really reveals, as the title states, the "Power of Events."The book starts off establishing the author's grounding in Enterprise Architectures (and their shortcomings), and then proceeds to build an intuitive foundation to seduce the reader into the world of events that they may not have realized was so much a part of distributed systems.While the formal notation used in the book may appear daunting, it is easily mastered and the subtle rules and mechanism are exposed through many thoughtful examples.I will say the second half of the book is a slower read than the 1st part, but the book should leave you with some confidence that there really are some breakthroughs in software technology that will have a positive impact on distributed IT System quality and the complex event processing shows that potential.

Surprisingly Easy to Read
As IT infrastructure weaves itself into every aspect of a business, managing these systems becomes an imperative. The Lines of Business demand complete and the real time visibility into the IT infrastructure. Most systems developed do not allow the IT departments to manage at these levels. Dr Luckhams book propose a framework for managing this complexity. He puts forth, in a simple and readable manner how do manage systems by observing the "Cloud of Events" and how to build systems that are easier to manage.

It is the first book that I have come across that deals with the topic of IT management at a level that is not too abstract or complete focused on existing tools, instead Dr Luckham takes the reader much closer to a solution to the problem by getting them to think about the problem in the right way. He puts years of Stanford research into a readable form for the ordinary mortal. Bravo.

Ground Breaking, Heavyweight, Must-Have
It is seldom that one comes across a software engineering book that is free of hype and doesn't cut corners when it comes to providing details.This book is a must-have for every software professional.You don't have to be working on a cutting edge project to benefit from this book.What this book teaches is a new way of critically thinking about complex software design and architecture.The book is masterfully written and as its Preface states, is the result of over a decade of hard-core research into event pattern matching conducted at Stanford University.This is a book that one can put to use right away, using tools and systems that are available today. ... Read more

Book Description
The study of complex systems has attracted a broad range of researchers from many disciplines spanning both the hard and soft sciences. In the Autumn of 1997, 300 of these researchers came together for the First International Conference on Complex Systems. The proceedings of this conference is the first book in the New England Complex Systems Institute Series on Complexity and includes more than 100 presentations and papers on topics like evolution, emergence, complexity, self-organization, scaling, informatics, time series, emergence of mind, and engineering of complex systems. ... Read more

Book Description
Computer and communication networks are among society's most important infrastructures. The internet, in particular, is a giant global network of networks with central control or administration. It is a paradigm of a complex system, where complexity may arise from different sources: topological structure, network evolution, connection and node diversity, and /or dynamical evolution. This is the first book entirely devoted to the new and emerging field of nonlinear dynamics of TCP/IP networks. It addresses both scientists and engineers working in the general field of communication networks. ... Read more

Book Description

Recent advances in science and technology have led to a rapid increase
in the complexity of most engineered systems. In many notable cases,
this change has been a qualitative one rather than merely one of magnitude.
A new class of Complex Engineered Systems (CES) has emerged as a result
of technologies such as the Internet, GPS, wireless networking, micro-robotics, MEMS, fiber-optics and nanotechnology. These complex engineered systems are composed of many heterogeneous subsystems and are characterized by observable complex behaviors that emerge as a result of nonlinear spatio-temporal interactions among the subsystems at several levels of organization and abstraction. Examples of such systems include the World-Wide Web, air and ground traffic networks, distributed manufacturing environments, and globally distributed supply networks, as well as new paradigms such as self-organizing sensor networks, self-configuring robots, swarms of autonomous aircraft, smart materials and structures, and self-organizing computers. Understanding, designing, building and controlling such complex systems is going to be a central challenge for engineers in the coming decades.

Book Description

This book addresses dynamical aspects of brain functions and cognition. Experimental evidence in humans and other mammalians indicates that complex neurodynamics is crucial for the emergence of higher-level intelligence. Dynamical neural systems with encoding in limit cycle and non-convergent attractors have gained increasing popularity in the past decade. The role of synchronization, desynchronization, and intermittent synchronization on cognition has been studied extensively by various authors, in particular by authors contributing to the present volume. This volume gives an overview of recent advances in this interdisciplinary field of cognitive science related to dynamics of cognition, including experimental studies, dynamical modelling and interpretation of cognitive experiments, and theoretical approaches. The following topics are covered in this book: spatio-temporal dynamics of neural correlates of higher-level cognition; dynamical neural memories, including continuous and discrete approaches; mathematical and physical models of cognition; experiments on dynamical aspects of cognition; interpretation of normal and abnormal cognitive behaviours.

Book Description
Derived from the 2001 Santa Fe Institute Conference, "The Economy as an Evolving Complex System III," represents scholarship from the leading figures in th area of economics and complexity.The subject, a perennial centerpiece of the SFI program of studies has gained a wide range of followers for its methods of employing empirical evidence in the development of analytical economic theories.Accordingly, the chapters in this volume addresses a wide variety of issues in the fields of economics and complexity, accessing eclectic techniques from many disciplines, provided that they shed light on the economic problem.Dedicated to Kenneth Arrow on his 80th birthday, this volume honors his many contributions to the Institute.SFI-style economics is regarded as having had an important impact in introducing a new approach to economic analysis. ... Read more

Amazon.com
John Holland's Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems is one of the classics in the field of complex adaptive systems. Holland is known as the father of genetic algorithms and classifier systems and in this tome he describes the theory behind these algorithms. Drawing on ideas from the fields of biology and economics, he shows how computer programs can evolve. The book contains mathematical proofs that are accessible only to those with strong backgrounds in engineering or science.Book Description
Genetic algorithms are playing an increasingly important role in studies of complex adaptive systems, ranging from adaptive agents in economic theory to the use of machine learning techniques in the design of complex devices such as aircraft turbines and integrated circuits. Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems is the book that initiated this field of study, presenting the theoretical foundations and exploring applications.

In its most familiar form, adaptation is a biological process, whereby organisms evolve by rearranging genetic material to survive in environments confronting them. In this now classic work, Holland presents a mathematical model that allows for the nonlinearity of such complex interactions. He demonstrates the model's universality by applying it to economics, physiological psychology, game theory, and artificial intelligence and then outlines the way in which this approach modifies the traditional views of mathematical genetics.

Initially applying his concepts to simply defined artificial systems with limited numbers of parameters, Holland goes on to explore their use in the study of a wide range of complex, naturally occuring processes, concentrating on systems having multiple factors that interact in nonlinear ways. Along the way he accounts for major effects of coadaptation and coevolution: the emergence of building blocks, or schemata, that are recombined and passed on to succeeding generations to provide, innovations and improvements.

John H. Holland is Professor of Psychology and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He is also Maxwell Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and is Director of the University of Michigan/Santa Fe Institute Advanced Research Program. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The founder's words
This is a wonderful time. We can read about information theory in Shannon's own words, fuzzy logic in Zadeh's, relativity in Einstein's, and genetic programming in Holland's. He created evolutionary algorithms, and shares his thoughts in this brief work.

1975, when he first published this work, was a long time ago. Since then, computing has advanced, computing demands have advanced, and biology has advanced. Biology, because it functions at all the levels from atoms to worlds, has bottomless potential for insight. Because the atoms, the worlds, and everything between are all unfriendly, biology has many problems to solve. It doesn't matter whether you are an oak tree, a virus, or a whale, the solution (at the species level) is the same: evolve. Holland was the first to harness that incredible problem-solving power to computational use.

A huge literature has built up from Holland's founding thoughts. Those thoughts are here, in their original and purest form. It is hardly surprising that Holland anticipated so many elaborations of his work. One, in particular, struck me: the idea of 'hot spots' for genetic crossover. Or rather the opposite: 'cold spots' where crossover is inhibited. As a computer scientist, Holland's first thoughts were written in binary. When you allow points where crossover can not occur, you allow coherent multibit values - maybe even floating point. It's easy to laugh at Holland's initial naivete now, but he was talking about the foundations, not the structure built up from it.

If you have ever programmed genetic algorithms, you have been stunned by their effectiveness in creating good solutions. 'Good' doesn't mean precisely optimal, but pretty damm good anyway.

If you were a hard core creationist to start with, you still are. But now you know that evolutionary problem solving is powerful, broad, subtle, and effective - so much, that it's hard to believe it could ever have arisen by chance.

//wiredweird

Not an Introductory book
I am learning by myself the topic of Genetic Algorithms (GA) for my PhD dissertation. Even though this book is written for John H. Holland considered the father of Genetics Algorithms, this is not a basic or easy reading book.The book does not contain any source code and even though it contains some kind of pseudocode, it will not give you a clear idea about how to implement a GA. If you want an introduction book maybe you should look for the Mitchell Melanie's book "An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms" , Fogel's book "Evolutionary Computation vol. 1" or Chamber's book "The Practical Handbook of Genetic Algorithms".
The way the author approaches the development of the framework is sometimes overwhelming because the author does not concentrate in one specific case or concept but he mentions all the different possibilities almost at the same time. I think it is worthwhile to buy the book to have it for advanced understanding of the concepts involved in the study of Complex Adaptive System. My approach to learn GA will be reading the above mentioned books and then study this book in a very detailed and slowly way to digest the huge amount of concepts and information provided by it.

Genetic Algorithms Classic for Engineering
This book presents an inspirational synthesis from mathematics, computer science and systems theory addressing genetic algorithms and their role in intelligent engineering/business systems.

Topics include: background, aformal framework, illustrations (genetics, economics, game playing,searches, pattern recognition and statistical inference, control andfunction optimization, and central-nervous system), schemata, the optimalallocation of trials, reproductive plans and genetic operators, therobustness of genetic plans, adaptation of coding and representations, andoverview, interim and prospectus.

Inclusion of a disk ofspreadsheet-based examples would have increased user-friendliness to thesometimes moderately-complex mathematics. Otherwise, this book is a wellpresented, and useful classic for researchers and software vendors seekingto develop more innovative intelligent products. ... Read more

Book Description
This is the first monograph to present the fundamentals ofadjoint equation theory and perturbation algorithms, exemplifyingtheir applications by solutions of complex problems of mathematicalphysics. The earlier Russian version (1992) has been completelyrevised and supplemented with many new results for this edition, thusoffering a unique compilation of the author's research in many areasof applied mathematics over the years. The first part of the book describes the theory of adjoint equationsand perturbation algorithms and gives examples of applications toproblems. Nonlinear problems and statements of inverse problems basedon methods of adjoint equations and perturbation are considered. Thesecond part focuses on the applications of adjoint equations theoryand perturbation algorithms to the solution of concrete problems, suchas global and regional environmental protection, interaction betweenatmosphere and ocean, and data assimilation problems. This volume will be of great value to a wide range of researchers,workers and engineers interested in creating new technologies fordesigning and planning experiments, while solving concrete problems,especially for those working on numerical mathematics. ... Read more

Book Description
How does a bird flock keep its movements so graceful and synchronized? Most people assume that the bird in front leads and the others follow. In fact, bird flocks don't have leaders: they are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. And a surprising number of other systems, from termite colonies to traffic jams to economic systems, work the same decentralized way. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams describes innovative new computational tools that can qhelp people (even young children) explore the workings of such systems--and help them move beyond the centralized mindset. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (15)

Is a good start but needs more...
Book needs some more content, it gives a good first level intro but does not develop it into more interesting/advanced things.

50% of the book is a 'sales' pitch for StarLogo.

If you have experience with writing code for simulations this book is a bit light technically.

Still has some interesting ideas in it.

The arcane made accessible
On the surface, the book seems focused on computers and even video games.This makes the activities appealing for middle and high school students.However, the ideas in this book are actually relevant to two entirely different fields:1) genetics, and 2) artificial intelligence.Both these fields have at their centers the concept of complexity arising out of simplicity.Students who work their way though the activites in this book will find that Dr. Resnick offers a window into a deep mathematical world that has applications far beyond computers and games.

Great Starting Point in Agent based Modelling
Mitchel Resnick shares a lovely sense of wonder, discovery and fascination in this slim, easily read volume about agent based modelling.Using micro-worlds (termites, ants and other modelling metaphors) Resnick shows us how collective behaviours are more than a simple sum of the parts - and through his experiments using StarLogo programming he shows the nature of emergent behaviours that come through decentralised thinking.

His reading list is a great starting point for anyone fascinated by Complexity and Agent Based Modelling, and so too is his elegant list of guiding heuristics that he has learned through toying with various ants, termites, forest fires and traffic jams.

- Positive feedback (in models) often plays a vital role.
- Randomness can help create order. Random isn't always chaotic.
- A Flock is not a big bird. The behaviour of groups should not be confused with the behaviour of individuals.
- A traffic jam is not just a collection of cars. Emergent objects have an ever-changing composition.
- The hills are alive. Don't just focus on the individual objects - look also at their environment.

This volume helped our research team design approach agent-based modelling, and put us in touch with other avenues of decentralised thinking: for example Network Theory. Best of all, Resnick helped us lighten-up. This book (and its subject matter) has profound ideas, but never loses a delicious sense of awe. Recommended.

interesting, but describes an old version of the software
This is a book describing the research of a team at MIT using a version of the educational language "Logo". Running in a simple graphical environment which supports multiple parallel operation of code in the same shared space. Write a few lines of code for an "ant", then let 1000 of them loose. The current version of this "StarLogo" system is written in Java, and available as a free download for anyone to play with.

The use of Logo is both a strength and a weakness of the approach.The strength is that the code is concise and easy to understand.The weakness is that there is only one source of the software, and anyone wishing to try it is limited to the available download.This would not be such a limitation if the book described the same version, but unfortunately things have moved on a lot since the book was written, and few (if any) of the examples will work without alteration.

As well as the development of the StarLogo system, the book covers experiments in emergent behaviour.Typical sections include how parameter and environment changes can affect the growth and development of simulated ant colonies, and a theoretical basis for those "phantom traffic jams" we have all experienced.

This book is certainly interesting if you are interested in developing parallel software simulations, or if you are interested in marginal computer languages, but don't expect the code to work without effort.

Invention - on all levels
This book provided the motivating force to write my first, and last, review for Amazon.com.

Over the past 5 years since my first reading Mitchel Resnick's Turtles Turmites and Traffic Jams, the book has come up on numerous occasions related to several topics, two of which most basically:

1) Writing style - Resnick's clear, well-researched, simple yet profound style.His background as journalist and inventor enables TT&T to walk a new line between source material and criticism.

2) Content - Resnick's theoretical application of emergent behavior to education is robust; his practical educational tools (starlogo and later, mindstorms) are a fundamentally clear and wondrous collapsing of idea into artifact.

I will include this book with few others in my life bibliography. ... Read more

Product Description

Complex Dynamics: Advanced System Dynamics in Complex Variables is a graduate-level monographic textbook. It has seven Chapters. The introductory Chapter 1 explainsin plain Englishthe objective of the book and provides the preliminaries in complex numbers and variables; it also gives a soft introduction to quantum dynamics. Chapter 2 develops low-dimensional dynamics in the complex plane, theoretical and computational, continuous- and discrete-time. Chapter 3 presents a modern introduction to quantum dynamics, mainly following Dirac's notation. Chapter 4 develops geometrical machinery of complex manifolds, essential for the further text. Chapter 5 develops high-dimensional complex continuous dynamics, which takes place on complex manifolds. Chapter 6 develops the formalism of complex path integrals, which extends the continuous dynamics to the general high-dimensional dynamics, which can be both discrete and stochastic. In the last, Chapter 7, all previously developed methods are employed to present theHoly Grailof modern physical and cosmological science, the search for thetheory of everythingand thetruecosmological dynamics.

Book Description
Introduces key concepts in complex systems theory to readers concerned with language, its acquisition, and its use.Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics demonstrates the applicability and usefulness of these concepts to a range of areas in applied linguistics including second language development, language teaching, and discourse analysis. It concludes with a chapter that inventories suitable approaches to research investigations.brbrbName of series:/b Oxford Applied Linguistics ... Read more