Simply Complexity

What do traffic jams, stock market crashes, and wars have in common? They are all explained using complexity, an unsolved puzzle that many researchers believe is the key to predicting - and ultimately

什麼是複雜性科學？我們又為什麼要研究複雜性科學？事實上，自相對論被提出以來，許多人就已經將複雜性科學視為最重要的科學發展方向，甚至認為它能幫助人類瞭解宇宙萬物的本質，被稱作“所有科學的科學”。“二者為伴，三即複雜”是本書作者尼爾‧約翰遜對複雜性給出的基本定義，只要集合了一群人，這群人就會以複雜的方式相互影響、彼此競爭，於是就形成了一個複雜系統。從要不要紮堆去新開業的酒吧，如何避開交通堵塞，如何找到理想的伴侶，到金融市場的走勢，甚至戰爭的成敗與傷亡，全都與複雜系統有關。作者認為，現實世界中，一群對象對某種稀缺資源的爭奪構成了複雜性的本質，無論這種資源是食物、空間、能源、權力還是財富，而研究複雜性科學的終極目標就是理解、預測和控制因群體行為帶來的湧現現象，從而在爭奪稀缺資源的競爭中提升優勢，有效規避風險，做出最佳決策。

Tracing the complexity and contradictory nature of work throughout historyBy the end of the nineteenth century, the general Western conception of work had been reduced to simply gainful employment. Bu

Do your students know how to effectively revise their knowledge?Academic standards call for increased rigor, but simply raising complexity is not enough. Students must also be able to deliberately rev

Can your students analyze their own understanding of content?Academic standards call for increased rigor, but simply raising complexity is not enough. Students must also know how to investigate, exper

Can your students encode critical information into their long-term memories?Academic standards call for increased rigor, but simply raising complexity is not enough. Students must also know how to ret

Can your students process and respond to information quickly? Academic standards call for increased rigor, but simply raising complexity is not enough. Students need to be able to process information

Academic standards call for increased rigor, but simply raising complexity is not enough. Students must also be able to examine similarities and differences within the critical content they are learni

This book examines the question of whether languages can differ in grammatical complexity and, if so, how relative complexity differences might be measured. The volume differs from others devoted to t

Can your students record and represent what they've learned?Academic standards call for increased rigor, but simply raising complexity is not enough. Students must know how to effectively interact wit

Can your students recognize when their own logic is flawed?Academic standards call for increased rigor, but simply raising complexity is not enough. Students need to know how to state a claim and supp

Do your students know which content is most important to learn? Academic standards call for increased rigor, but simply raising complexity is not enough. Students must also take responsibility for the

Are you a bona-fide wine connoisseur, investing in rare vintages--or a neophyte just learning to appreciate wine's complexity? Whether you have the quintessential wine cellar or you simply delight in

"I want to teach you how to cook good food at home. By stripping away all the hard graft and complexity, anyone can produce mouth-watering recipes. Put simply, I'm going to show you how to cook yourse

In this provocative and informative book, Don Norman writes that the complexity of our technology must mirror the complexity and richness of our lives. It’s not complexity that’s the problem; it’s bad

Global Complexity is a path-breaking book, which examines how the ideas of chaos and complexity can help us to analyse global processes. Urry argues that there are major advantages in thinking about g

Global Complexity is a path-breaking book, which examines how the ideas of chaos and complexity can help us to analyse global processes. Urry argues that there are major advantages in thinking about g

The first unified introduction and reference for the field of computational complexity. Virtually non-existent only 25 years ago, computational complexity has expanded tremendously and now comprises a

Communication Complexity describes a new intuitive model for studying circuit networks that captures the essence of circuit depth. Although the complexity of boolean functions has been studied for alm

Larmore aims to recover three forms of moral complexity that have often been neglected by moral and political philosophers. First, he argues that virtue is not simply the conscientious adherence to principle. Rather, the exercise of virtue apply. He argues - and this is the second pattern of complexity - that recognizing the value of constitutive ties with shared forms of life does not undermine the liberal ideal of political neutrality toward differing ideals of the good life. Finally Larmore agrues for what he calls the heterogeneity of morality. Moral thinking need not be exclusively deontological or consequentialist, and we should recognize that the ultimate sources of moral value are diverse. The arguments presented here do not attack the possibility of moral theory. But in addressing some of the central issues of moral and political thinking today thay attempt to restore to that thinking greater flexibility and a necessary sensitivity to our common experience.

In Complexity Economics for Environmental Governance, Jean-François Mercure reframes environmental policy and provides a rigorous methodology necessary to tackle the complexity of environmental policy and the transition to sustainability. The book offers a detailed account of the deficiencies of environmental economics and then develops a theory of innovation and macroeconomics based on complexity theory. It also develops a new foundation for evidence-based policy-making using a Risk-Opportunity Analysis applied to the sustainability transition. This multidisciplinary work was developed in partnership with prominent natural scientists and economists as well as active policy-makers with the aim to revolutionize thinking in the face of the full complexity of the sustainability transition, and to show how it can best be governed to minimize its distributional impacts. The book should be read by academics and policy-makers seeking new ways to think about environmental policy-making.

Understanding philosophy has never been easier. Combining bold, elegant graphics with easy-to-understand text, Simply Philosophy is the perfect introduction to the subject for those who are short of t

Communication complexity is the mathematical study of scenarios where several parties need to communicate to achieve a common goal, a situation that naturally appears during computation. This introduction presents the most recent developments in an accessible form, providing the language to unify several disjoint research subareas. Written as a guide for a graduate course on communication complexity, it will interest a broad audience in computer science, from advanced undergraduates to researchers in areas ranging from theory to algorithm design to distributed computing. The first part presents basic theory in a clear and illustrative way, offering beginners an entry into the field. The second part describes applications including circuit complexity, proof complexity, streaming algorithms, extension complexity of polytopes, and distributed computing. Proofs throughout the text use ideas from a wide range of mathematics, including geometry, algebra, and probability. Each chapter contain

Proof complexity is a rich subject drawing on methods from logic, combinatorics, algebra and computer science. This self-contained book presents the basic concepts, classical results, current state of the art and possible future directions in the field. It stresses a view of proof complexity as a whole entity rather than a collection of various topics held together loosely by a few notions, and it favors more generalizable statements. Lower bounds for lengths of proofs, often regarded as the key issue in proof complexity, are of course covered in detail. However, upper bounds are not neglected: this book also explores the relations between bounded arithmetic theories and proof systems and how they can be used to prove upper bounds on lengths of proofs and simulations among proof systems. It goes on to discuss topics that transcend specific proof systems, allowing for deeper understanding of the fundamental problems of the subject.

Computational Complexity of Counting and Sampling provides readers with comprehensive and detailed coverage of the subject of computational complexity. It is primarily geared for researchers in enumer

Computational Complexity of Counting and Sampling provides readers with comprehensive and detailed coverage of the subject of computational complexity. It is primarily geared for researchers in enumer

This book stages a dialogue between international researchers from the broad fields of complexity science and narrative studies. It presents an edited collection of chapters on aspects of how narrativ

Expand your Python skills by working with data structures and algorithms in a refreshing context—through an eye-opening exploration of complexity science. Whether you’re an intermediate-le

Managing Complexity: Earth Systems and Strategies for the Future introduces and explores systems and complexity in relation to near-synchronous world and environmental problems. These relate to but ar

This collection of essays explores the different ways the insights from complexity theory can be applied to law. Complexity theory – a variant of systems theory – views law as an emergent, complex, se

Complexity theory aims to understand and classify computational problems, especially decision problems, according to their inherent complexity. This book uses new techniques to expand the theory for use with counting problems. The authors present dichotomy classifications for broad classes of counting problems in the realm of P and NP. Classifications are proved for partition functions of spin systems, graph homomorphisms, constraint satisfaction problems, and Holant problems. The book assumes minimal prior knowledge of computational complexity theory, developing proof techniques as needed and gradually increasing the generality and abstraction of the theory. This volume presents the theory on the Boolean domain, and includes a thorough presentation of holographic algorithms, culminating in classifications of computational problems studied in exactly solvable models from statistical mechanics.

Descriptive complexity theory establishes a connection between the computational complexity of algorithmic problems (the computational resources required to solve the problems) and their descriptive complexity (the language resources required to describe the problems). This groundbreaking book approaches descriptive complexity from the angle of modern structural graph theory, specifically graph minor theory. It develops a 'definable structure theory' concerned with the logical definability of graph theoretic concepts such as tree decompositions and embeddings. The first part starts with an introduction to the background, from logic, complexity, and graph theory, and develops the theory up to first applications in descriptive complexity theory and graph isomorphism testing. It may serve as the basis for a graduate-level course. The second part is more advanced and mainly devoted to the proof of a single, previously unpublished theorem: properties of graphs with excluded minors are decid

Two central problems in computer science are P vs NP and the complexity of matrix multiplication. The first is also a leading candidate for the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics. The second is of enormous practical and theoretical importance. Algebraic geometry and representation theory provide fertile ground for advancing work on these problems and others in complexity. This introduction to algebraic complexity theory for graduate students and researchers in computer science and mathematics features concrete examples that demonstrate the application of geometric techniques to real world problems. Written by a noted expert in the field, it offers numerous open questions to motivate future research. Complexity theory has rejuvenated classical geometric questions and brought different areas of mathematics together in new ways. This book will show the beautiful, interesting, and important questions that have arisen as a result.

The advent of social complexity has been a longstanding debate among social scientists. Existing theories and approaches involving the origins of social complexity include environmental circumscriptio

"Small Dynamic Complexity Classes" was awarded the E.W. Beth Dissertation Prize 2016 for outstanding dissertations in the fields of logic, language, and information. The thesis studies the foundations

This work addresses the topic of philosophical complexity, which shares certain assumptions with scientific complexity, cybernetics, and General Systems Theory, but which is also developing as a subje

The book is a collection of papers of experts in the fields of information and complexity. Information is a basic structure of the world, while complexity is a fundamental property of systems and proc

Geo-mathematical modelling: models from complexity science Sir Alan Wilson, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London Mathematical and computer models for a complexity scienc

Today’s leaders and managers have to operate in an environment characterised by complexity. What does coping with this ever- and faster-increasing degree of complexity require of them? It means that i

One striking feature of modern political and social development has been the construction of social systems encompassing more and more groups. The increase in social complexity, the authors of this vo