Complexity

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.

Complexity lies at the heart of social work practice and this book is designed to help students and newly-qualified social workers plan for and manage complex cases in an increasingly complex environm

Complexity lies at the heart of social work practice and this book is designed to help students and newly-qualified social workers plan for and manage complex cases in an increasingly complex environm

This work represents the third entry of the series of works on “Chaos, Complexity and Leadership”. Contents of the book are composed from broad range of chaos, complexity and their applications in mul

This book aims to assess the nature of morphological complexity, and the properties that distinguish it from the complexity manifested in other components of language. Of the many ways languages have

Economics is changing. In the last few years it has generated a number of new approaches. One of the most promising -complexity economics - was pioneered in the 1980s and 1990s by a small team at the

The importance of complexity is well-captured by Hawking's comment: "Complexity is the science of the 21st century". From the movement of flocks of birds to the Internet, environmental sustainability,

In this book, fascinating autobiographical accounts by leading scholars in a variety of fields and disciplines provide a rich introduction to the art and science of complexity and systems thinking. We

Applies complexity science to the study of international politics.

This book treats bounded arithmetic and propositional proof complexity from the point of view of computational complexity. The first seven chapters include the necessary logical background for the material and are suitable for a graduate course. Associated with each of many complexity classes are both a two-sorted predicate calculus theory, with induction restricted to concepts in the class, and a propositional proof system. The complexity classes range from AC0 for the weakest theory up to the polynomial hierarchy. Each bounded theorem in a theory translates into a family of (quantified) propositional tautologies with polynomial size proofs in the corresponding proof system. The theory proves the soundness of the associated proof system. The result is a uniform treatment of many systems in the literature, including Buss's theories for the polynomial hierarchy and many disparate systems for complexity classes such as AC0, AC0(m), TC0, NC1, L, NL, NC, and P.

This is the first book to describe large-scale complex adaptive systems and their application to practical business problems to yield excellent returns on investment. Various case studies are include

This review volume, co-edited by Nobel laureate G Ertl, provides a broad overview on current studies in the understanding of design and control of complex chemical systems of various origins, on scale

Spin glasses are disordered magnetic systems that have led to the development of mathematical tools with an array of real-world applications, from airline scheduling to neural networks. Spin Glasses a

Contributors in psychology, physics, art therapy, and other fields explore complexity in the interface between living systems and information technology. Their topics include fractal geometry as a bri

The editors (variously of Germany's Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Saarland U., and Johann Heinrich von Thuenen Institute) present 22 papers from an eponymous conference held by the Inte

This cross-disciplinary major work provides a coherent and essential reference for researchers and students seeking to understand real-life human organizing. The four-volume set explores the complex p

In this volume, which was originally published in 1996, noisy information is studied in the context of computational complexity; in other words the text deals with the computational complexity of mathematical problems for which information is partial, noisy and priced. The author develops a general theory of computational complexity of continuous problems with noisy information and gives a number of applications; deterministic as well as stochastic noise is considered. He presents optimal algorithms, optimal information, and complexity bounds in different settings: worst case, average case, mixed worst-average and average-worst, and asymptotic. The book integrates the work of researchers in such areas as computational complexity, approximation theory and statistics, and includes many fresh results as well. About two hundred exercises are supplied with a view to increasing the reader's understanding of the subject. The text will be of interest to professional computer scientists, statis

Information visualization and visualization of networks is introduced as a rapidly expanding new area of technology, art, and culture. Lima (Visual Complexity.com,;UX design lead, Microsoft Bing) desc

In John McWhorter’s Defining Creole anthology of 2005, his collected articles conveyed the following theme: His hypothesis that creole languages are definable not just in the sociohistorical sense, bu

This book is concerned with the theory of computability and complexity over the real numbers. This theory was initiated by Turing, Grzegorczyk, Lacombe, Banach and Mazur and has seen rapid growth in

Spatial planning is about dealing with our 'everyday' environment. In A Planner's Encounter with Complexity we present various understandings of complexity and how the environment is considered accord

This book treats bounded arithmetic and propositional proof complexity from the point of view of computational complexity. The first seven chapters include the necessary logical background for the material and are suitable for a graduate course. Associated with each of many complexity classes are both a two-sorted predicate calculus theory, with induction restricted to concepts in the class, and a propositional proof system. The complexity classes range from AC0 for the weakest theory up to the polynomial hierarchy. Each bounded theorem in a theory translates into a family of (quantified) propositional tautologies with polynomial size proofs in the corresponding proof system. The theory proves the soundness of the associated proof system. The result is a uniform treatment of many systems in the literature, including Buss's theories for the polynomial hierarchy and many disparate systems for complexity classes such as AC0, AC0(m), TC0, NC1, L, NL, NC, and P.

"The Complexity of Proceduralized Tasks" deals with the problem of quantifying the complexity of a proceduralized task; in other words, a task written as a procedure. This book proposes a systematic f

Outlining state-of-the-art developments in the area of complexity and design, this book collates them into a unique and authoritative resource for both the design and complex systems communities. The

This book offers an introduction to the field of complexity and landscape ecology. It covers such topics as connectivity, criticality, feedback, and networks, as well as their impact on the stability

Commerce, Complexity, and Evolution is a significant contribution to the paradigm - straddling economics, finance, marketing, and management - which acknowledges that commercial systems are evolutionary, and must therefore be analysed using evolutionary tools. Evolutionary systems display complicated behaviours which are to a significant degree generated endogenously, rather than being solely the product of exogenous shocks, hence the conjunction of complexity with evolution. This volume considers a wide range of systems, from the entire economy at one extreme to the behaviour of single markets at the other. The papers are united by methodologies which at their core are evolutionary, though the techniques cover a wide range, from philosophical discourse to differential equations, genetic algorithms, multi-agent simulations and cellular automata. Issues considered include the dynamics of debt-deflation, stock management in a complex environment, interactions between consumers and its ef

In recent years, agent-based simulation has become a widely accepted tool when dealing with complexity in economics and other social sciences. The contributions presented in this book apply agent-base

Contributors who are themselves presumably archaeologists, or at least anthropologists of some sort, demonstrate how to employ complexity--the interactions, multiple scales, and multiple layers of mea

Interactions matter. To understand the distributions of plants and animals in a landscape you need to understand how they interact with each other, and with their environment. The resulting networks o

The discrepancy method is the glue that binds randomness and complexity. It is the bridge between randomized computation and discrepancy theory, the area of mathematics concerned with irregularities in distributions. The discrepancy method has played a major role in complexity theory; in particular, it has caused a mini-revolution of sorts in computational geometry. This book tells the story of the discrepancy method in a few short independent vignettes. It is a varied tale which includes such topics as communication complexity, pseudo-randomness, rapidly mixing Markov chains, points on the sphere and modular forms, derandomization, convex hulls, Voronoi diagrams, linear programming and extensions, geometric sampling, VC-dimension theory, minimum spanning trees, linear circuit complexity, and multidimensional searching. The mathematical treatment is thorough and self-contained. In particular, background material in discrepancy theory is supplied as needed. Thus the book should appeal t

"The Moment of Complexity is a profoundly original work. In remarkable and insightful ways, Mark Taylor traces an entirely new way to view the evolution of our culture, detailing how information theor

Commerce, Complexity, and Evolution is a significant contribution to the paradigm - straddling economics, finance, marketing, and management - which acknowledges that commercial systems are evolutionary, and must therefore be analysed using evolutionary tools. Evolutionary systems display complicated behaviours which are to a significant degree generated endogenously, rather than being solely the product of exogenous shocks, hence the conjunction of complexity with evolution. This volume considers a wide range of systems, from the entire economy at one extreme to the behaviour of single markets at the other. The papers are united by methodologies which at their core are evolutionary, though the techniques cover a wide range, from philosophical discourse to differential equations, genetic algorithms, multi-agent simulations and cellular automata. Issues considered include the dynamics of debt-deflation, stock management in a complex environment, interactions between consumers and its ef

The discrepancy method is the glue that binds randomness and complexity. It is the bridge between randomized computation and discrepancy theory, the area of mathematics concerned with irregularities in distributions. The discrepancy method has played a major role in complexity theory; in particular, it has caused a mini-revolution of sorts in computational geometry. This book tells the story of the discrepancy method in a few short independent vignettes. It is a varied tale which includes such topics as communication complexity, pseudo-randomness, rapidly mixing Markov chains, points on the sphere and modular forms, derandomization, convex hulls, Voronoi diagrams, linear programming and extensions, geometric sampling, VC-dimension theory, minimum spanning trees, linear circuit complexity, and multidimensional searching. The mathematical treatment is thorough and self-contained. In particular, background material in discrepancy theory is supplied as needed. Thus the book should appeal t

This book documents the state of the art in combinatorial optimization, presenting approximate solutions of virtually all relevant classes of NP-hard optimization problems. The wealth of problems, alg

In this volume, which was originally published in 1996, noisy information is studied in the context of computational complexity; in other words the text deals with the computational complexity of mathematical problems for which information is partial, noisy and priced. The author develops a general theory of computational complexity of continuous problems with noisy information and gives a number of applications; deterministic as well as stochastic noise is considered. He presents optimal algorithms, optimal information, and complexity bounds in different settings: worst case, average case, mixed worst-average and average-worst, and asymptotic. The book integrates the work of researchers in such areas as computational complexity, approximation theory and statistics, and includes many fresh results as well. About two hundred exercises are supplied with a view to increasing the reader's understanding of the subject. The text will be of interest to professional computer scientists, statis