I tend to identify myself more strongly with Artificial Life as a discipline, with Complexity Science being more of an umbrella category.
Whilst ALife had a long period during the 90s of not much happening, I have seen a burst of results over tghe last 5 years, most spectacularly in robotics (robots that can walk for instance). In the field of evolutionary systems that I work in, we do know better how to measure evolutionary progress (eg Bedau-Packard statistics), and we do know some factors (eg specialisation - on of my own babies) that influence evolvability. We have also seen the emergence of protolife in artificial chemistry experiment (Tim Hutton's work comes to mind). But more seriously, which university has a department of complex systems? Theres the Santa Fe Institute, and possibly NECSI, but where else? Cheers On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 07:21:18AM -0600, Robert Holmes wrote: > Hi all, > > I really enjoyed Joe's post and it set me thinking - exactly what has > complexity science achieved? IMHO, one measure of a field's health is that > the field moves forward (radical, huh?). If I look at particle physics, they > now know stuff that they didn't 15 years ago (neutrino mass for example); if > I look at high-temperature superconductivity, Tc moves ever upwards. If I > look at string theory they ask (and occassionally answer) ever more abstruse > and unlikely questions that might not bear any relation to the real world > but are at least based on what was asked before. > > So here's the question: in the field of complexity science, exactly what can > we do now that we could not do 15 years ago? > > Robert > ============================================================ > 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 -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics 0425 253119 (") UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ 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
