#19 in the BookTree — Complexity: A guided tour by Melanie Mitchell

joelfirenze
Aug 23, 2017 · 2 min read

The list of the top 20 books by eigenvector centrality are dominated by Complexity books. They are somewhat overlapping, though they have slightly different emphases.

Complexity is linked to:

Emergence (1, 0.061)

Resilience (3, 0.039)

Critical Mass (4, 0.031)

The picture above is the 2-degree map for Complexity.

There are often a few features of complexity books. They talk about the intellectual framework behind complexity theory, and how they differ from the existing scientific frameworks. The main difference often mentioned is the change between simple cause-effect theories, to areas where causality becomes difficult to perceive. Rather than a linear-causality world, complexity is often introduced as a non-linear-causality world.

Mitchell’s book goes a little deeper into the intellectual constructs, mentioning Godel’s inconsistency theorem. It emphasises a little more on the genetic algorithms, partly because she has been researching that herself. Of the several complexity books in the BookTree, Melanie Mitchell’s treatment is the most technical, almost nudging an amateur to begin getting into the field.

Mitchell’s treatment also looks at information and computation rigorously, connecting both thermodynamics, computation and evolution. These concepts are not always connected in this way, as obvious as it might be on hindsight. The reason that we have complexity in the world around us is the result of an open thermodynamic environment that allows for computation and evolution.

As a researcher in the field, the book also looks at the history of how the discipline develops, and was published recently enough to address the problems posed by Wolfram’s New Kind of Science.

I really liked Complexity for its attempt to give a sense of the different branches of the complexity science — and especially for its attempt to pull together networks, computation and evolution together.

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joelfirenze

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Looking at trends, systems, organizations, politics, industries and how they interact. Contribute to my efforts at www.patreon.com/scalable_analysis.

Scalable Analysis

Looking at institutions, systems, and scenarios.

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