Posted by
Michael Agar on
Jun 09, 2006; 11:51am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/FW-SFI-Seminar-Complexity-Parallel-Computation-and-Statistical-Physics-tp521927p521981.html
Yes, several colleagues here share your view of Harnessing
Complexity, though the SFI librarian told me it's seen as useful for
newcomers at the SFI summer school. It's more of a beginner's book.
I keep looking for good ones, because often I deal with groups who
link their own general observation of systems they deal with with
properties of CAS in general and get interested in how to look at
problems in new ways. But then they don't know where to go next. Add
to this their elaborate knowledge of an area the they work in that
makes the interpretation of complexity concepts and models into
their problems and the language they use to describe them extremely
problematic. I just started up with a group who work with youth
mental health who see in CAS new ways to think about services. They
want to learn more. So several of them are reading and I'm helping
them put some things together so a person who is interested can
access them. There's a large gap in this field between initial
observation of system behavior and the professional literature on
concepts and models, I think. I'll share the results of what we do,
with their permission, with the list in a few months.
Have to go A nonlinear dynamic crew appears today to work on the
house. Discrete charms of the bourgeoise adaptive systems (:
On Jun 9, 2006, at 2:23 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>
> I have read the book "Harnessing Complexity" as well, and was a
> bit disappointed. It is small and contains no interesting models.
> IMHO his classic books about "The Evolution of Cooperation"
> and "The Complexity of Cooperation" are much better. As you know, the
> first is about the iterated prisoner's dilemma, and in the second
> he presents the "Dissemination Model" which explains the emergence
> of culture through local convergence and global polarization, and
> his "Tribute Model" (for "building political actors") which captures
> some of the essential properties of power and tries to explain
> the origin of nations and empires. His agent based models are simple,
> but that's their beauty. The complexity should be in the results, not
> in the model itself.
>
> -J.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: friam-bounces at redfish.com [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com]
> On Behalf
> Of Michael Agar
> Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 8:56 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Unified Theory
>
> [...] I'm just reading Axelrod and Cohen's Harnessing
> Complexity, a book that means to introduce a broader audience who are
> thinking about organizations to complexity science. They organize the
> book in sections on variation, interaction and selection and do a
> nice job of introducing some of the differences that have to be
> included in a social and cultural millieu.
>
>
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