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1 What is Complexity?
1.2 The "Sciences of Complexity"
Recently there has been an explosion of fields and techniques loosely grouped around the "Sciences of Complexity" banner. Even though these have been considerably over-hyped they include many new useful techniques and metaphors. They are not, however, based on any coherent "complexity theory". Key practitioners in these fields recognise this and have frequently exhorted, anticipated and worked towards such a theory (e.g. [2, 12]), but at the moment there is no such body of general theory which has a useful analytical meaning outside individual component fields.
What these widely differing areas do share is a tendency to:
- use newer formal techniques (logics, automata, topological models, etc.);
- deal with systems where the behaviour of interest arises, at least partly, out of some contingent occurrences (e.g. evolutionary computation);
- tend to use modelling techniques which tend to predict and capture mainly second-order properties (e.g. it may not be able to predict a value at a particular future time but may be able to tell you some statistical properties or reveal some qualitative aspects of the process).
Thus in a broad sense these techniques try to capture some more abstract properties of systems in areas where the application of more traditional techniques is not feasible. Thus this is also a negative definition, indicating that newer approaches had had to be applied. Again, if one needs to attempt a more exact and meaningful analysis this is an inadequate characterisation of the term.
From Complexity to Agent Modelling and Back Again - Bruce Edmonds - 15 MAY 97
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