Simplistic Complexity

This book is a state-of-the-art introduction into both algorithmic techniques for fixed-parameter tractability and the structural theory of parameterized complexity classes. It presents detailed proof

This book is a state-of-the-art introduction into both algorithmic techniques for fixed-parameter tractability and the structural theory of parameterized complexity classes. It presents detailed proof

This book provides a challenging and stimulating introduction to the contemporary topics of complexity and criticality, and explores their common basis of scale invariance, a central unifying theme o

Recent critiques of neoevolutionary formulations that focus primarily on the development of powerful hierarchies have called for broadening the empirical base for complex society studies. Redressing the neglect of sub-Saharan examples in comparative discussions on complex society, this book considers how case material from the region can enhance our understanding of the nature, origins and development of complexity. The archaeological, historical and anthropological case materials are relevant to a number of recent concerns, revealing how complexity has emerged and developed in a variety of ways. Contributors engage important theoretical issues, including the continuing influence of deeply embedded evolutionary notions in archaeological concepts of complexity, the importance of alternative modes of complex organization such as flexible hierarchies, multiple overlapping hierarchies, and horizontal differentiation, and the significance of different forms of power. The distinguished list

Modern cryptology increasingly employs mathematically rigorous concepts and methods from complexity theory. Conversely, current research topics in complexity theory are often motivated by questions an

This work views urban dynamics in the context of complexity theory; models and examples in scales from the local to the regional.As urban planning moves from a centralized, top-down approach to a dece

Over the past two decades, no field of scientific inquiry has had a more striking impact across a wide array of disciplines–from biology to physics, computing to meteorology–than that known as chaos and complexity, the study of complex systems. Now astrophysicist John Gribbin draws on his expertise to explore, in prose that communicates not only the wonder but the substance of cutting-edge science, the principles behind chaos and complexity. He reveals the remarkable ways these two revolutionary theories have been applied over the last twenty years to explain all sorts of phenomena–from weather patterns to mass extinctions.Grounding these paradigm-shifting ideas in their historical context, Gribbin also traces their development from Newton to Darwin to Lorenz, Prigogine, and Lovelock, demonstrating how–far from overturning all that has gone before–chaos and complexity are the triumphant extensions of simple scientific laws. Ultimately, Gribbin illustrates how chaos and complexity perme

We live in a moment of unprecedented complexity, an era in which change and information can move faster than our ability to comprehend them. With The Moment of Complexity, Mark C. Taylor offers a map

The science of complexity is concerned with the study of complex, adaptive systems. Its insights have in recent decades been applied with gusto by social scientists and other thinkers.As research in a

An up-to-date and critical analysis of how archaeologists study past societies, Archaeologies of Complexity addresses the nature of contemporary archaeology and the study of social change, and debates

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

Here is an accessible, algorithmically oriented guide to some of the most interesting techniques of complexity theory. The book shows that simple algorithms are at the heart of complexity theory. The

A groundbreaking look at complexity theory and its implications in the world of finance Complexity theory tells us that processes with a large number of seemingly independent agents-such as free marke

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 advanced handbook presents a broad and up-to-date view of the computational complexity theory of Boolean circuits. It combines the algorithmic and the automata-theoretic approaches, and includes

An advanced textbook giving a broad, modern view of the computational complexity theory of boolean circuits, with extensive references, for theoretical computer scientists and mathematicians.

An approach to complexity theory which offers a means of analysing algorithms in terms of their tractability. The authors consider the problem in terms of parameterized languages and taking "k-slices"

In Complexity and Postmodernism, Paul Cilliers explores the idea of complexity in the light of contemporary perspectives from philosophy and science. Cilliers offers us a unique approach to understand

Joyce, Chaos, and Complexity studies the manifold relations among twentieth-century mathematics and Science, James Joyce's fiction, and the critical reception of Joyce's work. Calling for profound rea

A computer science text bridging the gap between the perceived impenetrability of computability and complexity theory and practical programming problems. Jones (computer science, U. of Copenhagen) of

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

This work elucidates the structure and complexity of human language in terms of the mathematics of information and computation. It strengthens Chomsky's early work on the mathematics of language, with

By considering the size of the logical network needed to perform a given computational task, the intrinsic difficulty of that task can be examined. Boolean function complexity, the combinatorial study of such networks, is a subject that started back in the 1950s and has today become one of the most challenging and vigorous areas of theoretical computer science. The papers in this book stem from the London Mathematical Society Symposium on Boolean Function Complexity held at Durham University in July 1990. The range of topics covered will be of interest to the newcomer to the field as well as the expert, and overall the papers are representative of the research presented at the Symposium. Anyone with an interest in Boolean Function complexity will find that this book is a necessary purchase.

Computational Complexity and Natural Language heralds an entirely new way of looking at grammatical systems. It applies the recently developed computer science tool of complexity theory to the study o

Organisational Development in Practice: A Complexity Approach draws on conventional, critical and complexity thinking in relation to organisational development with a view to exploring what's useful and what's not.This book proffers an approach to organisational development that helps to develop, support, and maintain more democratic, collaborative, inclusive and sustainable ways of learning, working, and living. The author explores the practicalities of working with the frustrations and inconsistencies involved in coping with the patterns of human interaction that inevitably make up organisations, where planned and emergent approaches co-exist, whether we would like them to or not. Woven in between the substantive chapters are vignettes from a range of international practitioners reflecting on their own experiences in the field.This book is a radically different approach to organisational development suitable for advanced students and researchers of organisation and organisational dev

Materials and Sustainable Development, Second Edition, written by noted materials selection authority Mike Ashby, provides a structure and framework for analyzing sustainable development and the role of materials in it. The aim is to introduce ways of exploring sustainable development to readers in a way that avoids simplistic interpretations and approaches complexity in a systematic way. There is no completely right answer to questions of sustainable development - instead, there is a thoughtful, well-researched response that recognizes concerns of stakeholders, the conflicting priorities and the economic, legal and social aspects of a technology as well as its environmental legacy. The intent is not to offer solutions to sustainability challenges but rather to improve the quality of discussion and enable informed, balanced debate. The second edition has been updated to reflect new insights, regulatory trends, and other developments that have occurred since publication of the first edi

The first in a two-book series that champions and empowers children of colour in beautifully simplistic ways. This book teached children how to mix colours, and how all three primary colours, mixed together, make beautiful brown.

Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) are natural computational problems that appear in many areas of theoretical computer science. Exploring which CSPs are solvable in polynomial time and which are NP-hard reveals a surprising link with central questions in universal algebra. This monograph presents a self-contained introduction to the universal-algebraic approach to complexity classification, treating both finite and infinite-domain CSPs. It includes the required background from logic and combinatorics, particularly model theory and Ramsey theory, and explains the recently discovered link between Ramsey theory and topological dynamics and its implications for CSPs. The book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in theoretical computer science and to mathematicians in logic, combinatorics, and dynamics who wish to learn about the applications of their work in complexity theory.

This reference work provides an authoritative single source for understanding and applying the concepts of complexity theory together with the tools and measures for analyzing complex systems in all f

This book examines the environmental and technological complexity of South Carolina inland rice plantations from their inception at the turn of the seventeenth century to the brink of their institutional collapse at the eve of the Civil War. Inland rice cultivation provided a foundation for the South Carolina colonial plantation complex and enabled planters' participation in the Atlantic economy, dependence on enslaved labor, and dramatic alteration of the natural landscape. Moreover, the growing population of enslaved Africans led to a diversely-acculturated landscape unique to the Southeastern Coastal Plain. Despite this significance, Lowcountry inland rice cultivation has had an elusive history. Unlike many historical interpretations that categorize inland rice cultivation in a universal and simplistic manner, this study explains how agricultural systems varied among plantations. By focusing on planters' and slaves' alteration of the inland topography, this book emphasizes how agric

Two pioneering anthropologists reveal how complexity science can help us better understand how societies change over timeOver the past two decades, anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing and geneticist Mur

Two pioneering anthropologists reveal how complexity science can help us better understand how societies change over timeOver the past two decades, anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing and geneticist Mur

Intractability is a growing concern across the cognitive sciences: while many models of cognition can describe and predict human behavior in the lab, it remains unclear how these models can scale to situations of real-world complexity. Cognition and Intractability is the first book to provide an accessible introduction to computational complexity analysis and its application to questions of intractability in cognitive science. Covering both classical and parameterized complexity analysis, it introduces the mathematical concepts and proof techniques that can be used to test one's intuition of (in)tractability. It also describes how these tools can be applied to cognitive modeling to deal with intractability, and its ramifications, in a systematic way. Aimed at students and researchers in philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics who want to build a firm understanding of intractability and its implications in their modeling work, it is an id

Intractability is a growing concern across the cognitive sciences: while many models of cognition can describe and predict human behavior in the lab, it remains unclear how these models can scale to situations of real-world complexity. Cognition and Intractability is the first book to provide an accessible introduction to computational complexity analysis and its application to questions of intractability in cognitive science. Covering both classical and parameterized complexity analysis, it introduces the mathematical concepts and proof techniques that can be used to test one's intuition of (in)tractability. It also describes how these tools can be applied to cognitive modeling to deal with intractability, and its ramifications, in a systematic way. Aimed at students and researchers in philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics who want to build a firm understanding of intractability and its implications in their modeling work, it is an id

By highlighting the complex set of factors and their interactions that have shaped Arab-Iranian relations, the book hopes to be a corrective to the simplistic and reductionist interpretations of these

By highlighting the complex set of factors and their interactions that have shaped Arab-Iranian relations, the book hopes to be a corrective to the simplistic and reductionist interpretations of these

In A New Philosophy of Society Manuel DeLanda offers a fascinating look at how the contemporary world is characterized by an extraordinary social complexity. Since most social entities, from small com

Discover the different types of dinosaurs that once roamed the Earth in this simplistic and vibrantly illustrated board book perfect for young nonfiction readers.A long, long time ago, dinosaurs roame

Grammatical Complexity in Academic English uses corpus-based analyses to challenge a number of dominant stereotypes and assumptions within linguistics. Biber and Gray tackle the nature of grammatical complexity, demonstrating that embedded phrasal structures are as important as embedded dependent clauses. The authors also overturn ingrained assumptions about linguistic change, showing that grammatical change occurs in writing as well as speech. This work establishes that academic writing is structurally compressed (rather than elaborated); that it is often not explicit in the expression of meaning; and that scientific academic writing has been the locus of some of the most important grammatical changes in English over the past 200 years (rather than being conservative and resistant to change). Supported throughout with textual evidence, this work is essential reading for discourse analysts, sociolinguists, and applied linguists, as well as descriptive linguists and historical linguists

The complexity of the twenty-first century threat landscape contrasts markedly with the bilateral nuclear bargaining context envisioned by classical deterrence theory. Nuclear and conventional arsenal