COMPLEXITY --- A GUIDED TOUR by Melanie Mitchell, 2009
    PREFACE (ix- )

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (xv- )

    PART 1 --- Background and history

      1) What is complexity? (3- )

      2) Dynamics, chaos, and prediction (15- )

      3) Information (40- )

      4) Computation (56- )

      5) Evolution (71- )

      6) Genetics, simplified ( 88- )

      7) Defining and measuring complexity (94- )

    PART 2 --- Life and evolution in computers

      8) Self-reproducing computer programs (115- )

      9) Genetic algorithms (127- )

    PART 3 --- Computation writ large

      10) Cellular automata, life, and the universe (145- )

      11) Computing with particles (160- )

      12) Information processing in living systems (169- )

      13) How to make analogies --- if you are a computer (186- )

      14) Prospects of computer modeling (209- )

    PART 4 --- Network thinking

      15) The science of networks (227- )

      16) Applying network science to real-world networks (247- )

      17) The mystery of scaling (258- )

      18) Evolution, complexified (273- )

    PART 5 --- Conclusion

      19) The past and future of the sciences of complexity (291- )

    NOTES (304- )

    BIBLIOGRAPHY (326- )

    INDEX (337- )
OUTLINE OF BOOK'S FACTS & IDEAS
    PRODUCT DESCRIPTION = What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive questions that the science of complexity seeks to answer.

    In this remarkably accessible and companionable book, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate, detailed tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. Comprehending such systems requires a wholly new approach, one that goes beyond traditional scientific reductionism and that re-maps long-standing disciplinary boundaries. Based on her work at the Santa Fe Institute and drawing on its interdisciplinary strategies, Mitchell brings clarity to the workings of complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that apply to all of them. She explores as well the relationship between complexity and evolution, artificial intelligence, computation, genetics, information processing, and many other fields.

    Richly illustrated and vividly written, Complexity: A Guided Tour offers a comprehensive and eminently comprehensible overview of the ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for the field's contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our time.

    BOOKLIST REVIEW = "All theoretical models are wrong, but some are useful." Both inevitable error and promising usefulness abound in the bold conceptual models that Mitchell surveys in exploring the nascent science of complexity. Readers will marvel at the sheer range of settings in which complex systems operate: from ant hills to the stock market, from "T Cells" to Internet web searches, from disease epidemics to power outages, complexity challenges the intellectual adroitness of theorists.

    With refreshing clarity, Mitchell invites nonspecialists to share in these researchers' adventures in recognizing and measuring complexity and then predicting its cascading effects. Concepts central to thermodynamics, information theory, and computer programming all come into focus in this foray into the recesses of complexity. Still, the analysis illuminates more than explanatory frameworks (such as network diagrams and genetic algorithms); piquant personalities (including Stephen Jay Gould and John von Neumann) also receive illuminating scrutiny. Though Mitchell acknowledges the doubts of skeptics, she still expresses hope that persistent complexity researchers will yet weld their disparate accomplishments into a coherent paradigm. Mind-expanding. Christensen, Bryce. From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

    "Complexity stands out from other popular science books by mentioning recent discoveries and theories from genetics. Readers may enjoy Mitchell's personal perspective and her inclusion of recent research. Readers who have not been introduced to the ideas explored in Complexity will find the content fascinating."--Mathematical Association of America Reviews "Mitchell's tour will be a helpful introduction to those in various disciplines who seek a gentle introduction to this emerging specialty."--Computing Reviews

    "The author, a denizen of the community of complexity researchers, provides an engaging introduction to the many interdisciplinary issues surrounding attempts at understanding how fantastic holistic attributes can arise from teems of underwhelming components -- how minds arise from simple neurons and cagey ant colonies from embarrassingly thick-headed individual ants. If Mitchell's book were required reading for undergraduate freshmen, I would anticipate a large surge in the number of students interested not only in complexity, but interested in science more generally. And not just more students, but students more exercised about what may lie ahead as they attempt to come to grips with nature."--Quarterly Review of Biology

    "The best popular science books are those that give the reader the sense of looking over the shoulder of a leading researcher doing cutting-edge work at the frontier of scientific inquiry. Isaacson's recent biography of Einstein belongs in this category. So too does Melanie Mitchell's Complexity: A Guided Tour."--The Oregonian

    "How can something be dependent and autonomous at the same time? And why do so many systems in nature show this hierarchical organization? No on has answered these questions, but in Complexity, computer scientist, Melanie Mitchell...offers a valuable snapshot of the growing field of complex-systems science from which the answers may eventually arise."--Nature

    "The book succeeds in buckling down much of the field's ambiguity, along with its role in the scientific community. And refreshingly, while laying out the surprisingly diverse set of fundamental theories that compose the framework for studying complex systems, Mitchell never oversteps the achievements of what her field has actually produced."--Bookslut
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