The motivation for this multi-part series is solely my observation that much of the writing on complexity theory seems to have arbitrarily ignored the vast systems theory literature. I don’t know whether this omission is deliberate (i.e., motivated by the political need to differentiate and promote one set of topical boundaries from another; a situation unfortunately driven by a reductionist fu...

Researchers in the social sciences currently employ a variety of mathematical/ computational models for studying complex systems. Despite the diversity of these models, the majority can be grouped into one of three types: agent (rule-based) modeling, dynamical (equation-based) modeling and statistical (aggregate-based) modeling. The purpose of the current paper is to offer a fourth type: case-b...

Over the past thirty-five years complexity theory has become a broad ranging subject that is appreciated in a variety of ways, illustrated more or less in the books by Anderson, Arrow, and Pines (1988), Nicolis and Prigogine (1989), Mainzer (1994), Favre et al. (1995), Belew and Mitchell (1996), and Arthur, Durlauf, and Lane (1997). The study of “complex adaptive systems” (Cowan, Pines, and Mel...

Complexity, as a theoretical background has made it easier to understand and explain the features and dynamic behavior of various complex systems. As the common theoretical background has confirmed, borrowing the terminology for design from the natural sciences has helped to control and understand urban complexity. Phenomena like self-organization, evolution and adaptation are appropriate to de...

abstract: we are living in a world that is increasingly faced with dynamic, complex and unpredictable business environment. in this situation, creating and sustaining competitive advantage depends on continuous businesses innovativeness and technological improvement that is basically done by r& d organizations. there are a vast literature on the positive relationship between leadership and perf...

Advocates of complexity theory describe it as a new scientific paradigm. Complexity theory identifies instability and disorder in politics and policy making, and links them to the behaviour of complex systems. It suggests that we shift our analysis from individual parts of a political system to the system as a whole; as a network of elements that interact and combine to produce systemic behavio...

We give a short introduction to some questions in complexity theory and proceed to give some recent developments. In particular, we discuss probabilistically checkable proofs and their applications in establishing inapproximability results. In a traditional proof the proofchecker reads the entire proof and decides deterministically whether the proof is correct. In a probabilistically checkable ...

Properties, Models and the Limits of Understanding John Collier Box 209, Carp, Ontario K0A 1L0 email: [email protected] http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/pl/Staff/JohnCollier/ Abstract: Complexly organized systems include biological and cognitive systems, as well as many of the everyday systems that form our environment. They are both common and important, but are not well understood. ...