Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Phil Henshaw wrote: Well that curve is the clearest kind of complex systems inforation we ever get. This is one beautiful and dramatic bullet of information, and I think if we ask a hundred systems scientists what it means we'll get a lot of opinion, much of it not based on systems theory. I think what's amazing about the curve is that it shows a remarkably clear dynamic in the trust of the nation, a long period on the same path of decay. What I read it as, and others may differ, is that out trust in war as a response to terror actually never had a growth, climax or stability period, only a decay period. I think it is reasonable to posit that the lack of trust that explains these general trends. However, in this case it appears to have started before 9/11 (and before military actions in Afghanistan or Iraq). The same plots for other presidents could give a baseline for general properties of presidential popularity. There may be a common friction. One could compare the general slope for one and two term presidents with the idea that two term presidents did something right. (I would think someone has done this, but have not investigated.) Another interpretation is that popularity decays just in the face of steady negative media coverage. That some people are sensitive to the news and some are less sensitive and that it takes a long period of exposure for some people to take a negative opinion. In this model, introducing a concept like trust is not necessary. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Well that curve is the clearest kind of complex systems inforation we ever get. This is one beautiful and dramatic bullet of information, and I think if we ask a hundred systems scientists what it means we'll get a lot of opinion, much of it not based on systems theory. I think what's amazing about the curve is that it shows a remarkably clear dynamic in the trust of the nation, a long period on the same path of decay. What I read it as, and others may differ, is that out trust in war as a response to terror actually never had a growth, climax or stability period, only a decay period. Growth curves are usually direct evidence of the regular organizational development processes of complex systems. I think we should include using them to locate physical examples of the phenomena we wish to model, as one means of finding windows into seeing how they actually work. Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 1:37 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3 Phil Henshaw wrote: What do you think the amazing shape of the Bush approval curve means, about the complex system events of American politics? http://jackman.stanford.edu/blog/?p=74 I rate this as very high quality data on a very real but unnoticed large scale complex system behavior. What do you see it as. It might show that people prefer to follow rather than think. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Hi Phil, But on systems, you say this research institute idea will let people become nearly clairvoyant about how people will behave. Um, you suggested a research institute, not me. I would see this kind of project as largely modeling work to be done, with a strong focus on skillful applied people and domain experts. A strategic simulation system is pretty well understood cognitive tool, but I admit I do imagine something bigger. Indeed, an architecture that can be used to model populations on a multitude of dimensions. For use from everything from urban planning to national security. Full GIS, automatic parallelism, optional object orientation, physics simulation features, clever constraint fitting and optimization, etc. Automated model validation with an expectation of huge underlying compute power. Not just numerically but also semantically, building on projects like http://www.opencyc.com. A while back DoD had a project called HLA (High Level Architecture) that was along these lines but I think it never really went anywhere. My main objection to that was that it was too concerned about federated simulation, i.e. pulling in legacy simulation codes. Also needed is a growing array of database resources; Everything from Lexus/Nexus to detailed map, scholarly works, census data, and whatever else would be available to classified users -- all integrated by some kind of unified query system. A big workbench where analysts can work efficiently to try to pin down algorithms for human behaviors and institutions they see or read about. Ideally there would be some open source core package developed for the public good that would seek to support many different kinds of users in academia, business and government. Perhaps that could be done at some invented institute, but probably better to actually try to ensure it gets done by hiring a credible contractor. With that momentum to get started, users could develop more open or proprietary modules and databases to develop a rich ecology for modeling the human world. Could such a thing make decision makers clairvoyant? Of course not. But it could pull everything together in one place and help the people that support those decision makers look at a problem at a range of scales, and consider alternatives systematically. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Phil Henshaw wrote: Honestly Marcus, your ethics seem no better than your sense of modeling. Just because we're in what the Chinese call 'interesting times' doesn't mean that abusing people is either OK or useful. At the end of a long work day, I'll indulge myself. Ok, I'm not a pacifist and I'm not opposed to the use of force -- I am, however, opposed to blind and thoughtless use of force that does not serve U.S. interests even in the near term. We insure ourselves in various ways as individuals and pay according to some formula some actuary has worked out for someone we vaguely resemble. As far as I'm concerned would be great to see elected officials so constrained as well. Would be nice to know if their decisions pass a standard national safety and efficiency quality control suite (a simulation), as that's surely a heck of a lot more critical accountability than they have now! Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
OK, so let's take half the defense budget and spend it on Bucky's 'livingry' rather than weaponry. How much you need? It certainly couldn't be more of a waste than spending it threaten fanatic community groups to obtain nuclear weapons... I'd still have some major doubts about the adequacy of present modeling assumptions. No one seems to have recognized that growth systems are locally invented compounding instabilities to themselves yet, or that natural system networks are mostly linked opportunistically rather than deterministically, or that the variables of our relationship statements generally refer to things that keep changing definition with little notice. I don't think it's an easy problem. Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2006 7:12 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3 Phil Henshaw wrote: I think modeling is out of reach, but story telling may not be. Telling the stories of how complex events can be read or misread would be a real service. There will be policy makers and I think it is safe to say they'll find it easier to convince people of their policies if there are some dramatic stories involved (e.g. 9/11, WMDs). I expect a careful and restrained story of the kind you describe above will be overwhelmed in general by story tellers at think tanks like the Project for the New American Century who don't hesitate to provide `leadership' (Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld). On a technical note, I don't buy that social simulations would be computationally prohibitive, given the will. The fastest general purpose supercomputer at Livermore is $100e6 U.S. (BlueGene/L) having 130k processors. Suppose a simulation ran for a day, that's still 130k simulations a day. That's a lot of sensitivity analysis one could do. It might take 10 teams of modelers to keep such a machine busy. For national security, what's a $100 million here or there? The 2006 budget for Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative computing was $661 million and $6.3 billion overall for stockpile stewardship. Yet I keep hearing that `non-state actors' the new threat.. How do you model brains full of made up nonsense?? Detectives, trial lawyers, and spies tease out models from deceptive people and suboptimal evidence. No shame in formalizing these models, if only to make it clear what is far from being known. And to deal with a culture that only wants compliance and to stay `on message' all I can suggest is to 1) stomach it, and 2) slowly bend the message in some other direction. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Interesting conversation but it needs to fall on the appropriate ears. You need a lobby to at least get this discussion on the computers of legislative aids. - Original Message - From: Marcus G. Daniels [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Sent: Monday, August 07, 2006 7:27 AM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3 Phil Henshaw wrote: OK, so let's take half the defense budget and spend it on Bucky's 'livingry' rather than weaponry. How much you need? It certainly couldn't be more of a waste than spending it threaten fanatic community groups to obtain nuclear weapons... Half the U.S. defense budget is $209 billion and half of Homeland Security is $15 billion. Together $50 billion is being spent on domestic defense. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/budget06/budget06Agencies.html For starters pull an amount of 1% of the scale of the domestic defense budget from the larger defense budget. That would be $500 million dollars. Plenty to buy the best supercomputers and a team of a few dozen project managers, political scientists, intelligence experts, and modelers. Take say $100 million to reimburse the CIA and NSA for their time on data collection. I'd still have some major doubts about the adequacy of present modeling assumptions. No one seems to have recognized that growth systems are locally invented compounding instabilities to themselves yet, or that natural system networks are mostly linked opportunistically rather than deterministically, or that the variables of our relationship statements generally refer to things that keep changing definition with little notice. I don't think it's an easy problem. I agree there is a lot that can't be modeled effectively without heavy data collection and lots of focused attention. And some social phenomena are probably too fleeting to capture and the precedents too silent. But consider elections in this country. Usually it is pretty clear how things will go once some exit polls are taken. I'm thinking of how to study the demographics of change as a function of military and civil violence, occupation, propaganda and relief efforts. Situations where known perturbations have been made to the system, and then an effort is made to model how those perturbations can be used to predict rates and intensity of near and medium term disruptive events. Insurgency, say, must have some common properties and unfold in ways that are a function of the number of young people prepared to die, explosives, technology, and money available and so forth. I imagine such models not so much for precise prediction on the ground, but to be developed over a long periods to fit abstract scenarios. To help planners understand social risk as well as direct tactical risk. I know some programs like this are already underway, but it's unclear to me the degree of funding. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Phil Henshaw wrote: Try predicting the repeat offences of individual criminals. It's not possible. I'm actually not suggesting predicting anything on a individual level, except to the extent that ex-officio roles like Olmert, Nasrallah, Ahmadinejad, bin Laden, and Bush would probably need to be modeled. I'm suggesting predicting trends in a set of subpopulations over time. The primary purpose of a model like this would be to make aggregate predictions about the cascade of events from a significant event. Secondarily, because getting fine-grained data on how events actually transpire is hard, a simulation facilitates what-if exploration of a tactical and strategic space, given an array of made-up but plausible group reaction functions. Zbigniew Brzezinski might have pondered if we fund the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets, what's the likelihood these people will endure and extend their narcissistic rage toward the United States [as Al-Qaeda]. Or the Mossad might have thought more carefully about how much rope they extended to the Hamas. A computer simulation that tracked these organizations as existing and intermixing with the general population (trying to spread their message) could provide some risk profile for the kind of damage they could do. It would at least remind elected officials in later years of the fact they exist at all. One place to start would be to use signals intelligence to infer a network of communication patterns. Then on that network overlay representative agents that have some capability set, depth of funding, human resources, and degree of extremism or political agendas. The overall political climate would determine what rate volunteers could be recruited, and the organizational types would determine where they went. (That goes for all sides.) For example, we keep hearing analysts saying how Israel has polarized the Lebanese to the point that now Hezbollah is popular. Perhaps that fades away fast, or perhaps it collapses in a month or two of intensive destruction, or perhaps it intensifies and mobilizes a larger set of fighters. Point is, it's surely got some scaling and dynamics -- mad people create dynamics at least so long as they are alive. I see such a model as sort of thermometer to answer questions like: Who is mad What are they doing now (as a group, relevant to the conflict) What could they do in the next week, month year, if they achieve it What can't they do in the next week, month year if they are stopped Where are they Who are they connected to as allies and as enemies What do they want What do they need What do they believe and how mutable is it Some of these things will change over time, some of may have narrow variances some of them wide. But hit it hard enough, or wait for someone else to, and something has got to give. If some of those shifts are predictable, then that's potentially usable for decision makers. It doesn't mean it all has to be predictable. It doesn't matter what virtual soldier Shlomo is having for lunch (unless perhaps he shows up on CNN). The parts that are hopeless can be discarded and the parts that show utility can be elaborated. But this is not like medicine where doing harm is avoided. No, in our world it seems to be the norm to futz with the patient using blunt dirty instruments and see what happens (and then sometimes bother to write it down). Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Gee, what you seem to be giving good evidence for is high paid professional 'quasi-scientific' consulting that is disasterously incompetent. Now, I'm sure to object less to messed up plans and research from people who share my personal prejudices. But isn't what's been happening amount to a lot of people planning and acting boldly on seriously misinformed models? I mean really, when you look at those duplicate completely fake and irrational charts you so nicely identified, how could any kind of measure to be made of them at all? How do you model brains full of made up nonsense?? I think modeling is out of reach, but story telling may not be. Telling the stories of how complex events can be read or misread would be a real service. Then again, what if we just decided to spend an equal amount of money figuring out how to get along with people as on destroying them. That would be novel. The last time I checked killing people pisses their friends off, especially when they are seen as defending the religious honor of a whole people, though I haven't seen any official studies. Who knows, perhaps an eye for an eye is just incorrect. We should study this. Maybe the requirement for being a descent neighbor is to unilaterally NOT return insults... or some thing like that. Sorry for the sarcasm, but that RAND poop just plain pisses me off. Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2006 3:13 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3 Phil Henshaw wrote: It seems to have been an error to trust our gut feelings about that, but we got worked up and did it anyway. Potentially complex system theory could design measures to give people an outside view of these things we get swept up in. Here are a couple of documents describing counter terrorism strategy of the White House: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050425/25roots_3.htm http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/counter_terror ism/counter_terrorism_strategy.pdf Compare page 13 in the latter (as labeled in pages of the document, or 15 in the page selector) with this RAND project, e.g. page 11 (page 19 in the page selector). http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/2005/RAND_CF212.pdf Five pages later, some marker issues are listed that locate Islamic groups ideologically, namely democracy, human rights, Shari'a law vs. civil law, rights of minorities, status of women, legal rights, public participation, segregation, and lifestyle issues. The next page goes on to describe examples of different groups on this spectrum and then gives suggestions on how to use it in a divide and conquer propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of Islamic moderates. These sorts of ideas could be extended into agent models to think about the rates at which such aid and propaganda efforts might progress or backfire. Searching some newspapers or blogs could give some ideas on how such efforts are likely to be resented, e.g. http://zeitgeistgirl.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_zeitgeistgirl_arc hive.html. In contrast, in today's New York Times, the front page has an article on Hezbollah, _Holding a Gun, Lending a Hand_, which describes the loyalty of Hezbollah fighters due to the support given to them and their families by the organization. Seems like US aid could undermine terrorist organizations by doing better at the same job. All these forces could be considered in an agent model. It probably wouldn't matter if such a simulation had 1e4 or 1e7 agents of different persuasions, but rather the mixing ratios of just enough agents so that the dynamics would be the smooth and similar in a larger simulation of similar demographics for the same relative configuration. Personally, I'd rather have political scientists and technical people developing crude models of various international stability situations than flushing billions of tax dollars down the drain on a gut feeling Maybe provide real time updates to one of those CNN ticker lines showing odds of success, cumulative cost, and expected value. :-) Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Phil Henshaw wrote: I think modeling is out of reach, but story telling may not be. Telling the stories of how complex events can be read or misread would be a real service. There will be policy makers and I think it is safe to say they'll find it easier to convince people of their policies if there are some dramatic stories involved (e.g. 9/11, WMDs). I expect a careful and restrained story of the kind you describe above will be overwhelmed in general by story tellers at think tanks like the Project for the New American Century who don't hesitate to provide `leadership' (Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld). On a technical note, I don't buy that social simulations would be computationally prohibitive, given the will. The fastest general purpose supercomputer at Livermore is $100e6 U.S. (BlueGene/L) having 130k processors. Suppose a simulation ran for a day, that's still 130k simulations a day. That's a lot of sensitivity analysis one could do. It might take 10 teams of modelers to keep such a machine busy. For national security, what's a $100 million here or there? The 2006 budget for Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative computing was $661 million and $6.3 billion overall for stockpile stewardship. Yet I keep hearing that `non-state actors' the new threat.. How do you model brains full of made up nonsense?? Detectives, trial lawyers, and spies tease out models from deceptive people and suboptimal evidence. No shame in formalizing these models, if only to make it clear what is far from being known. And to deal with a culture that only wants compliance and to stay `on message' all I can suggest is to 1) stomach it, and 2) slowly bend the message in some other direction. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Phil Henshaw wrote: it does point to one of the grand properties of human perception, and I think emergent complexity generally, that every observer feels 'in their guts' that their own perception provides the one correct model of the universe! Another view is that the perceptions shared by others may be done to manipulate and confuse, and to forward the agenda of a local group. I'm not suggesting the President should be best described as a skeptic. For example, in legal matters, ignoring subjective interpretations, in favor of objective evidence, is vigilance. Talk is cheap! Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Hi Phil, It's a step in the right direction to try to distinguish objective fact from subjective opinion, but there are lots of things for which that isn't easy. It would be interesting to evaluate a model of political violence by populating an imaginary world with an ensemble of individual psychologies. One assumption could be your notion of everyone in `living in their own dreamworld', subject to different forces of propaganda, economic constraints, and so on. They all react to their world independently, and are at once both amoral and innocent, but over time various sorts of organizations and ideals take shape and these in turn shape generation after generation. Alternatively, one can imagine that people in power follow their gut because their advisors are not trustworthy. The question being the degree to which coarse vs. fine-grained interactions in populations explain how power and institutions form as well as co-evolved organizations that seek to destroy these institutions.. [etc] Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Unfortnately, neither business management nor governing is a total disclosure game. Even if it was, it's likely to be as complicated or more so than say Go (a great total disclosure game). Even the strongest Go players eventually have to resort to what 'looks good' or 'feels right' because they lack the (perhaps expressible) analytical skills to deduce a correct answer. I guess, we hope that our intrinsic value system (gut feel?) matches with our chosen political leaders who make decisions we are likely to favor regardless of whether we know or not if it is the right choice in the short term, the medium term or the long term. In fact, even the relatively highly constrained environment of Go has not been solved computationally, and performance of the best program doesn't approach anywhere near the same level as the best Chess programs, so, relucantly I wonder, what hope is there of computationally solving problems involving millions of agents in dozens of countries acting in myriads of ways (for example)? May be that wasn't the question. Robert Jochen Fromm wrote: Perhaps the best way to solve complex problems is to let your guts decide ? What did Stephen Colbert say at the White House Correspondents Dinner ? ..That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut, see http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879 -J. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Perhaps the best way to solve complex problems is to let your guts decide ? What did Stephen Colbert say at the White House Correspondents Dinner ? ..That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut, see http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-869183917758574879 -J. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
All, Please take good notes it would be the kind of thing that I would love to work on as perhaps a book or pamplet once I can get myself retired and out there. Nick Nicholas Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson [Original Message] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: friam@redfish.com Date: 8/2/2006 12:00:25 PM Subject: Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3 Send Friam mailing list submissions to friam@redfish.com To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can reach the person managing the list at [EMAIL PROTECTED] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of Friam digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: WedTech: Formalisms In Complexity; Wed Aug 2, 1:30p @ Tesoro (Owen Densmore) 2. Re: WedTech: Formalisms In Complexity; Wed Aug 2, 1:30p @ Tesoro (Phil Henshaw) 3. Re: WedTech: Formalisms In Complexity; Wed Aug 2, 1:30p @ Tesoro (Jochen Fromm) -- Message: 1 Date: Tue, 1 Aug 2006 12:12:22 -0600 From: Owen Densmore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] WedTech: Formalisms In Complexity; Wed Aug 2, 1:30p @ Tesoro To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed To kick off our discussions of Formalisms In Complexity, I thought I'd add this to the mix. -- Owen Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org -- The Six Desert Island Books On Complexity (In no particular order) This list began after several conversations on FRIAM about formalism, and its lack, in Complexity. These prompted me to see just what *was* available. These books all cover part of our Science with sufficient formalism. I've not read all of any of them, they are more like references for me, but they are focused on areas important to be rigorous about within our Science, if it is to be one. 1 - Bar-Yam: Dynamics of Complex Systems http://tinyurl.com/qumgf I put this first because it stands in for a Complexity Textbook. Surprisingly, there are no such texts that I've been able to find. Bar-Yam does a great job of looking at the areas deemed complex in the early 1990's when the book was written. 2 - Newman, Barabasi, Watts: The Structure and Dynamics of Networks http://tinyurl.com/jh3u8 This is the next best thing to a textbook, a series of readings, with a good introduction, in an area within complexity. There are others books of readings, the SFI redbooks, for example. This is particularly of interest to us due to the fast rise of graph theory within modeling. 3 - MacKay: Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/ http://tinyurl.com/e5len Robert Holmes led us to this delightful book when he led a couple of WedTech meetings on the Monte Carlo techniques (Ch 29). This book is not only exceptional for its breadth, but also for its author putting the entire book online for free use! He also includes software examples using open source tools and actively maintains errata on his website. 4 - Gintis: Game Theory Evolving http://tinyurl.com/ew3yr Many of us use Agent Based Modeling for investigating problems. The agents have behavior and evolve in time. This book is a bit wacky in its approach, disdaining dogmatic and classical approaches, in order to focus on the import of evolution within game theory. Its kinda fun too. 5 - Strogatz: Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Engineering http://tinyurl.com/e8ldl Strogatz may be the best teacher of technically difficult material in the world! He's won important prizes in this area. This is a great book for physicists who've always wondered why their profs gently led them around the great gaping holes in their art. 6 - Devaney: An Introduction to Chaotic Dynamical Systems http://tinyurl.com/z3l8r Our sister science, Chaos, has made exquisite headway in formalizing a difficult area. Were we so lucky! I have Chaos envy! There are several books out there, but this is the most cited I think. I'd also consider Davies, Exploring Chaos, for his short treatment and inclusion of really excellent Java applets, and Williams, Chaos Theory Tamed, for its very pragmatic, approachable and broad coverage. On Jul 31, 2006, at 11:23 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: As you have likely noticed, we've had a few conversations on FRIAM
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3
Nick and FRIAM-ers, I assume Nick's talking about the book-development meeting. I can't be at the meeting today, but wouldn't mind doing something on efforts to apply complexity in real-world decision making contexts - like foreign policy. - Laura FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
