Models such as Schellings segregation and Axtel and Epsteins artificial societies typically take place on some bounded checker board through which nothing flows. By the defintion below are these therefore not complex systems?

Robert

On 7/21/06, Stephen Guerin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>  Yet when I ask for a formal treatment, I get no answer.

I very much like Hubler's deceptively simple definition of complexity:
        "A complex systems is a system with large throughput of Energy,
Information, Force, .... through a well designed boundary."

His notes from the SFI CSSS school with this definition are here:
http://www.how-why.com/ucs2002/tutorial/


As a restatement of the same ideas that formalizes what "large" means, I would
offer:
        "complexity emerges when a gradient acting on a system exceeds the
capacity of the internal degrees of freedom of the system to dissipate the
gradient".


Is that formal enough? or, does the statement need to be mathematized?

-Steve

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