Complexity Quotes

“Everything affects everything else, and you have to understand that whole web of connections.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“If you have a truly complex system," he says, "then the exact patterns are not repeatable. And yet there are themes that are recognizable. In history, for example, you can talk about 'revolutions,' even though one revolution might be quite different from another. So we assign metaphors. It turns out that an awful lot of policy-making has to do with finding the appropriate metaphor. Conversely, bad policy-making almost always involves finding inappropriate metaphors. For example, it may not be appropriate to think about a drug 'war,' with guns and assaults.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“An adaptive agent is constantly playing a game with its environment. What exactly does that mean? Distilled to the essence, what actually has to happen for game-playing agents to survive and prosper?

Two things, Holland decided: prediction and feedback.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Competition and cooperation may seem antithetical,” he says, “but at some very deep level, they are two sides of the same coin.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“all these complex systems have somehow acquired the ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance. This balance point—often called the edge of chaos—is were the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Predictions are nice, if you can make them. But the essence of science lies in explanation, laying bare the fundamental mechanisms of nature.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“It's also the principle that lies behind all of Oriental martial arts. You don't try to stop your opponent, you let him come at you-and then give him a tap in just the right direction as he rushes by. The idea is to observe, to act courageously, and to pick your timing extremely well.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Holland took the question very seriously; he'd thought alot about it. Look at meteorology, he told them. The weather never settles down. It never repeats itself exactly. It's essentially unpredictable more than a week or so in advance. And yet we can comprehend and explain almost everything that we see up there. We can identify important features such as weather fronts, jet streams, and high-pressure systems. We can understand their dynamics. We can understand how they interact to produce weather on a local and regional scale. In short, we have a real science of weather-without full prediction. And we can do it because prediction isn't the essence of science. The essence is comprehension and explanation. And that's precisely what Santa Fe could hope to do with economics and other social sciences, he said: they could look for the analog of weather fronts-dynamical social phenomena they could understand and explain.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop , Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“In contrast to mainstream artificial intelligence, I see competition as much more essential than consistency," he says. Consistency is a chimera, because in a complicated world there is no guarantee that experience will be consistent. But for agents playing a game against their environment, competition is forever. "Besides," says Holland, "despite all the work in economics and biology, we still haven't extracted what's central in competition." There's a richness there that we've only just begun to fathom. Consider the magical fact that competition can produce a very strong incentive for cooperation, as certain players spontaneously forge alliances and symbiotic relationships with each other for mutual support. It happens at every level and in every kind of complex, adaptive system, from biology to economics to politics. "Competition and cooperation may seem antithetical," he says, "but at some very deep level, they are two sides of the same coin.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Kauffman was in awe when he realized all this. Here it was again: order. Order for free. Order arising naturally from the laws of physics and chemistry. Order emerging spontaneously from molecular chaos and manifesting itself as a system that grows. The idea was indescribably beautiful.

But was it life? Well no, Kauffman had to admit, not if you meant life as we know it today. An autocatalytic set would have had no DNA, no genetic code, no cell membrane. In fact, it would have had no real independent existence except as a haze of molecules floating around in some ancient pond. If an extraterrestrial Darwin had happened by at the time, he (or it) would have been hard put to notice anything unusual. Any given molecule participating in the autocatalytic set would have looked pretty much like any other molecule. The essence was not to be found in any individual piece of the set, but in the overall dynamics of the set: its collective behavior.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Indeed, except for the very simplest physical systems, virtually everything and everybody in the world is caught up in a vast, nonlinear web of incentives and constraints and connections. The slightest change in one place causes tremors everywhere else. We can't help but disturb the universe, as T.S. Eliot almost said. The whole is almost always equal to a good deal more than the sum of its parts. And the mathematical expression of that property-to the extent that such systems can be described by mathematics at all-is a nonlinear equation: one whose graph is curvy.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“They believe that they are forging the first rigorous alternative to the kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has dominated science since the time of Newton—and that has now gone about as far as it can go in addressing the problems of our modern world.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Most obviously, they agreed, an autocatalytic set was a web of transformations among molecules in precisely the same way that an economy is a web of transformations among goods and services. In a very real sense, in fact, an autocatalytic set was an economy—a submicroscopic economy that extracted raw materials (the primordial “food” molecules) and converted them into useful products (more molecules in the set). Moreover, an autocatalytic set can bootstrap its own evolution in precisely the same way that an economy can, by growing more and more complex over time. This was a point that fascinated Kauffman. If innovations result from new combinations of old technologies, then the number of possible innovations would go up very rapidly as more and more technologies became available. In fact, he argued, once you get beyond a certain threshold of complexity you can expect a kind of phase transition analogous to the ones he had found in his autocatalytic sets. Below that level of complexity you would find countries dependent upon just a few major industries, and their economies would tend to be fragile and stagnant. In that case, it wouldn’t matter how much investment got poured into the country. “If all you do is produce bananas, nothing will happen except that you produce more bananas.” But if a country ever managed to diversify and increase its complexity above the critical point, then you would expect it to undergo an explosive increase in growth and innovation—what some economists have called an “economic takeoff.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Theoretical economists use their mathematical prowess the way the great stags of the forest use their antlers: to do battle with one another and to establish dominance.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Like it or not, the marketplace isn’t stable. The world isn’t stable. It’s full of evolution, upheaval, and surprise.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Why is it that simple particles obeying simple rules will sometimes engage in the most astonishing, unpredictable behavior?”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“The point was that you have to look at the world as it is, not as some elegant theory says it ought to be.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Complex systems are more spontaneous, more disorderly, more alive than that. At the same time, however, their peculiar dynamism is also a far cry from the weirdly unpredictable gyrations known as chaos. In the past two decades, chaos theory has shaken science to its foundations with the realization that very simple dynamical rules can give rise to extraordinarily intricate behavior; witness the endlessly detailed beauty of fractals, or the foaming turbulence of a river. And yet chaos by itself doesn't explain the structure, the coherence, the self-organizing cohesiveness of complex systems. Instead, all these complex systems have somehow acquired the ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance. This balance point—often called the edge of chaos—is were the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either. The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life. The edge of chaos is where new ideas and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown. The edge of chaos is where centuries of slavery and segregation suddenly give way to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; where seventy years of Soviet communism suddenly give way to political turmoil and ferment; where eons of evolutionary stability suddenly give way to wholesale species transformation. The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive, and alive. Complexity, adaptation, upheavals at the edge of chaos—these common themes are so striking that a growing number of scientists are convinced that there is more here than just a series of nice analogies. The movement's nerve center is a think tank known as the Santa Fe Institute, which was founded in the mid-1980s and which was originally housed in a rented convent in the midst of”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“However, he added, there is one big difference: "Our particles in economics are smart, whereas yours in physics are dumb." In physics, an elementary particle has no past, no experience, no goals, no hopes or fears about the future. It just is. That's why physicists can talk so freely about "universal laws": their particles respond to forces blindly, with absolute obedience. But in economics, said Arthur, "Our particles have to think ahead, and try to figure out how other particles might react if they were to undertake certain actions. Our particles have to act on the basis of expectations and strategies. And regardless of how you model that, that's what makes economics truly difficult.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“humanity is gravely threatened by superstition and myth, the stubborn refusal to recognize the urgent planetary problems, and generalized tribalism in all its forms.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“It will require the renunciation or sublimation or transformation of our traditional appetites: to outbreed, outconsume, and conquer our rivals, especially our rivals in other tribes. These impulses may once have been adaptive. Indeed, they may even be hard-wired into our brains. But we no longer have the luxury of tolerating them. And”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“So for James, too, will derives not from the freedom to initiate thoughts, but to focus on and select some while stifling, blocking-or vetoing-others. For Buddhist mindfulness practice, it is the moment of restraint that allows mindful awareness to take hold and deepen. The essence of directed mental force is first to stop the grinding machine-like automaticity of the urge to act. Only then can the wisdom of the prefrontal cortex be actively engaged.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“In about 1980, he says, at a time when he was still struggling to articulate his own vision of a dynamic, evolving economy, he happened to read a book by the geneticist Richard Lewontin. And he was struck by a passage in which Lewontin said that scientists come in two types. Scientists of the first type see the world as being basically in equilibrium. And if untidy forces sometimes push a system slightly out of equilibrium, then they feel the whole trick is to push it back again. Lewontin called these scientists "Platonists," after the renowned Athenian philosopher who declared that the messy, imperfect objects we see around us are merely the reflections of perfect "archetypes."

Scientists of the second type, however, see the world as a process of flow and change, with the same material constantly going around and around in endless combinations. Lewontin called these scientists "Heraclitans," after the Ionian philosopher who passionately and poetically argued that the world is in a constant state of flux. Heraclitus, who lived nearly a century before Plato, is famous for observing that "Upon those who step into the same rivers flow other and yet other waters," a statement that Plato himself paraphrased as "You can never step into the same river twice."

"When I read what Lewontin said," says Arthur, "it was a moment of revelation. That's when it finally became clear to me what was going on. I thought to myself, "Yes! We're finally beginning to recover from Newton.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“I think there's a personality that goes with this kind of thing," Arthur says. "It's people who like process and pattern, as opposed to people who are comfortable with stasis and order. I know that every time in my life that I've run across simple rules giving rise to emergent, complex messiness, I've just said, 'Ah, isn't that lovely!' And I think that sometimes, when other people run across it, they recoil.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Basically, what I'm saying is not at all new to Eastern philosophy. It's never seen the world as anything else but a complex system. But it's a world view that, decade by decade, is becoming more important in the West-both in science and in the culture at large. Very, very slowly, there's been a gradual shift from an exploitative view of nature-man versus nature-to an approach that stresses the mutual accomodation of man and nature. What has happened is that we're beginning to lose our innocence, or naivete, about how the world works. As we begin to understand complex systems, we begin to understand that we're part of an ever-changing, interlocking, nonlinear, kaleidoscopic world.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Instead of relying on the Newtonian metaphor of clockwork predictability, complexity seems to be based on metaphors more closely akin to the growth of a plant from a tiny seed, or the unfolding of a computer program from a few lines of code, or perhaps even the organic, self-organized flocking of simpleminded birds. That's certainly the kind of metaphor that Chris Langton has in mind with artificial life: his whole point is that complex, lifelike behavior is the result of simple rules unfolding from the bottom up. And it's likewise the kind of metaphor that influenced Arthur in the Santa Fe economics program: "If I had a purpose, or a vision, it was to show that the messiness and the liveliness in the economy can grow out of an incredibly simple, even elegant theory. That's why we created these simple models of the stock market where the market appears moody, shows crashes, takes off in unexpected directions, and acquires something that you could describe as a personality.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“...Axelrod also pointed out that TIT FOR TAT interactions lead to cooperation in the natural world even without the benefit of intelligence. Examples include lichens, in which a fungus extracts nutrients from the underlying rock while providing a home for algae that in turn provide the fungus with photosynthesis; the ant-acacia tree, which houses and feeds a type of ant that in turn protects the tree; and the fig tree whose flowers serve as food for fig wasps that in turn pollinate the flowers and scatter the seeds.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“In fact, the fourteen programs submitted in the first round of the tournament embodied a variety of complex strategies. But much to the astonishment of Axelrod and everyone else, the crown went to the simplest strategy of all: TIT FOR TAT. Submitted by psychologist Anatol Rapoport of the University of Toronto, TIT FOR TAT would start out by cooperating on the first move, and from there on out would do exactly what the other program had done on the move before. That is, the TIT FOR TAT strategy incorporated the essence of the carrot and the stick. It was "nice" in the sense that it would never defect first. It was "forgiving" in the sense that it would reward good behavior by cooperating the next time. And yet it was "tough" in the sense that it would punish uncooperative behavior by defecting the next time. Moreover, it was "clear" in the sense that its strategy was so simple that the opposing programs could easily figure out what they were dealing with.

Of course, with only a handful of programs entered in the tournament, there was always the possibility that TIT FOR TAT's success was a fluke. But maybe not. Of the fourteen programs submitted, eight were "nice" and would never defect first. And every one of them easily outperformed the six not-nice rules. So to settle the question Axelrod held a second round of the tournament, specifically inviting people to try to knock TIT FOR TAT off its throne. Sixty-two entrants tried-and TIT FOR TAT won again. The conclusion was inescapable. Nice guys-or more precisely, nice, forgiving, tough, and clear guys-can indeed finish first.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“Here was this elusive "Santa Fe approach": Instead of emphasizing decreasing returns, static equilibrium, and perfect rationality, as in the neoclassical view, the Santa Fe team would emphasize increasing returns, bounded rationality, and the dynamics of evolution and learning. Instead of basing their theory on assumptions that were mathematically convenient, they would try to make models that were psychologically realistic. Instead of viewing the economy as some kind of Newtonian machine, they would see it as something organic, adaptive, surprising, and alive. Instead of talking about the world as if it were a static thing buried deep in the frozen regime, as Chris Langton might have put it, they would learn how to think about the world as a dynamic, ever-changing system poised at the edge of chaos.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

“All this was fine by Cowan. He was always eager to find more people with that indefinable fire in their soul. It wasn't a matter of seeking out talent per se, he says. You could talk about the institute with an awful lot of excellent people who just didn't understand what you were driving at. Instead you had to look for a kind of resonance: "Either someone gets glassy-eyed or the communication begins," he says. "And if it does, then you're exercising a form of power that's extremely compelling: intellectual power. If you can get a person who understands the concept somewhere down in the bowels of the brain, where that same idea's been sitting forever, then you have a grasp on that person. You don't do it by physical coercion, but by a kind of intellectual appeal that amounts to a coercion. You grab them by the brain instead of by the balls.”
― M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos