you should look at systems in terms of how they behave instead of how they're made. And when you do, he says, then what you find are the two extremes of order and chaos. It's a lot like the difference between solids, where the atoms are locked into place, and fluids, where the atoms tumble over one another at random. But right in between the two extremes, he says, at a kind of abstract phase transition called "the edge of chaos," you also find complexity: a class of behaviors in which the components of the system never quite lock into place, yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either.
