Complex system
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A complex system is a system composed of many components which may interact with each other. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as power grid, transportation or communication systems, social and economic organizations (like cities), an ecosystem, a living cell, and ultimately the entire universe.
Complex systems are systems whose behavior is intrinsically difficult to model due to the dependencies, competitions, relationships, or other types of interactions between their parts or between a given system and its environment. Systems that are "complex" have distinct properties that arise from these relationships, such as nonlinearity, emergence, spontaneous order, adaptation, and feedback loops, among others. Because such systems appear in a wide variety of fields, the commonalities among them have become the topic of their independent area of research. In many cases, it is useful to represent such a system as a network where the nodes represent the components and links to their interactions.
Notable scholars
- Robert McCormick Adams
- Christopher Alexander
- Philip Anderson
- Kenneth Arrow
- Robert Axelrod
- W. Brian Arthur
- Yaneer Bar-Yam
- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
- Gregory Bateson
- Ludwig von Bertalanffy
- Samuel Bowles
- Guido Caldarelli
- Paul Cilliers
- Walter Clemens, Jr.
- Brian Enquist
- Joshua Epstein
- Doyne Farmer
- Jay Forrester
- Murray Gell-Mann
- Nigel Goldenfeld
- James Hartle
- John Holland
- Alfred Hubler
- Arthur Iberall
- Stuart Kauffman
- David Krakauer
- Ellen Levy
- Robert May
- Melanie Mitchell
- Cris Moore
- Edgar Morin
- Harold Morowitz
- Scott Page
- Luciano Pietronero
- David Pines
- Sidney Redner
- Jerry Sabloff
- Cosma Shalizi
- Dave Snowden
- Sergei Starostin
- Steven Strogatz
- Alessandro Vespignani
- Andreas Wagner
- Duncan Watts
- Geoffrey West
- Stephen Wolfram
- David Wolpert
See also
- Biological organisation
- Chaos theory
- Cognitive modeling
- Cognitive Science
- Complex (disambiguation)
- Complex adaptive system
- Complex networks
- Complexity
- Complexity (disambiguation)
- Complexity economics
- Cybernetics
- Decision engineering
- Dissipative system
- Dual-phase evolution
- Dynamical system
- Dynamical systems theory
- Emergence
- Enterprise systems engineering
- Fractal
- Generative sciences
- Homeokinetics
- Interdependent networks
- Invisible hand
- Mixed reality
- Multi-agent system
- Network science
- Nonlinearity
- Pattern-oriented modeling
- Percolation
- Percolation theory
- Process architecture
- Self-organization
- Sociology and complexity science
- System accident
- System dynamics
- System equivalence
- Systems theory
- |Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity