Exploring complexity

Think Complexity - Exploring Complexity Science with Python

Formal Tools for Exploring Complexity

Much of the discussion in this paper is concerned with clarifying the concepts of order, disorder, and complexity, and the formulation of their corresponding measures for a complex system. We begin with a review of the concept of entropy because this was the first measure of order in physical systems and understanding the evolution of this concept will also make clearer the evolution of our und...

Eye opener: exploring complexity using rich pictures

Historically, approaches to exploring complexity have mainly focused on the notion that complex problems must be deconstructed into simpler parts if we are to make sense of them; this is the so-called reductionist approach. When dealing with the complexity of human experience, however, deconstructing the experience without diminishing it is a daunting, perhaps impossible task. Researchers wishi...

Exploring Subexponential Parameterized Complexity of Completion Problems

Let F be a family of graphs. In the F-Completion problem, we are given an n-vertex graph G and an integer k as input, and asked whether at most k edges can be added to G so that the resulting graph does not contain a graph from F as an induced subgraph. It appeared recently that special cases of F-Completion, the problem of completing into a chordal graph known as Minimum Fill-in, corresponding...

Poverty Traps: Exploring the Complexity of Causation

Describing and explaining are two very different engagements, and yet development experts routinely write as though to describe were to explain. If this were not the case, it would be hard to understand why they have found it necessary to repeatedly describe the lives of the world’s poorest over the past 30 years. Consider the following sentence constructed from numerous writings—for example, b...