this article introduces some of the main concepts and methods of the science studying complex, self-organizing systems and networks, in a non-technical manner. Complexity cannot be strictly defined, only situated in between order and disorder. A complex system is typically modeled as a collection of interacting agents, representing components as diverse as people, cells or molecules. Because of...

Hermann Haken 1,* and Juval Portugali 2 1 Institute for Theoretical Physics, Center of Synergetics, Pfaffenwaldring 57/4, Stuttgart University, D-70550 Stuttgart, Germany 2 ESLab (Environmental Simulation Lab), Department of Geography and the Human Environment, Tel Aviv University, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel./Fax: +49-...

Typically, self-organization is defined as the evolution of a system into an organized form in the absence of external pressures. A broad definition of self-organization is given by Haken (2006). “A system is self-organizing if it acquires a spatial, temporal, or functional structure without specific interference from the outside. By ‘specific’ we mean that the structure or functioning is not i...

Starting from a random initial predisposition, the creation of a common piece of information in a network of sparsely communicating agents is the first step towards showing how order can be built from the bottom up rather than imposed from the top down. The model used for this study has been termed stochastic cellular automata (SCA). We identify three important elements of self-organization usi...

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Theoretical treatments of turbulence in fluids and plasmas often assume that the turbulence is isotropic and homogeneous. It is also often considered that turbulence produces uniformly distributed chaos, even when starting with a coherent initial con­ dition. Recently, however, phenomena which do not obey these classic concepts have emerged. For example, in two-dimen­ sional Navier-Stokes turbu...