Networking the complexity community since 1999
Maxi San Miguel
In this paper I intend to give an answer to three entangled questions: What is a Complex System?, What are present research challenges in Complex Systems?, and What is the purpose of the new journal Frontiers in Complex Systems?
Read the full article at: www.frontiersin.org
Bruce Edmonds
RofASSS
There is a modelling norm that one should be able to completely understand one’s own model. Whilst acknowledging there is a trade-off between a model’s representational adequacy and its simplicity of formulation, this tradition assumes there will be a “sweet spot” where the model is just tractable but also good enough to be usefully informative about the target of modelling – in the words attributed to Einstein, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”1. But what do we do about all the phenomena where to get an adequate model2 one has to settle for a complex one (where by “complex” I mean a model that we do not completely understand)? Despite the tradition in Physics to the contrary, it would be an incredibly strong assumption that there are no such phenomena, i.e. that an adequate simple model is always possible (Edmonds 2013).
Read the full article at: rofasss.org
Editor(s):Stoyan K. Smoukov, Joseph Seckbach, Richard Gordon
Conflicting Models for the Origin of Life provides a forum to compare and contrast the many hypotheses that have been put forward to explain the origin of life.
There is a revolution brewing in the field of Origin of Life: in the process of trying to figure out how Life started, many researchers believe there is an impending second creation of life, not necessarily biological. Up-to-date understanding is needed to prepare us for the technological, and societal changes it would bring. Schrodinger’s 1944 “What is life?” included the insight of an information carrier, which inspired the discovery of the structure of DNA. In “Conflicting Models of the Origin of Life” a selection of the world’s experts are brought together to cover different aspects of the research: from progress towards synthetic life – artificial cells and sub-cellular components, to new definitions of life and the unexpected places life could (have) emerge(d). Chapters also cover fundamental questions of how memory could emerge from memoryless processes, and how we can tell if a molecule may have emerged from life. Similarly, cutting-edge research discusses plausible reactions for the emergence of life both on Earth and on exoplanets. Additional perspectives from geologists, philosophers and even roboticists thinking about the origin of life round out this volume. The text is a state-of-the-art snapshot of the latest developments on the emergence of life, to be used both in graduate classes and by citizen scientists.
More at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Jana Lasser, Joanna M. Nield, Marcel Ernst, Volker Karius, Giles F. S. Wiggs, Matthew R. Threadgold, Cédric Beaume, and Lucas Goehring
Phys. Rev. X 13, 011025
From fairy circles to patterned ground and columnar joints, natural patterns spontaneously appear in many complex geophysical settings. Here, we investigate the origins of polygonally patterned crusts of salt playa and salt pans. These beautifully regular features, approximately a meter in diameter, are found worldwide and are fundamentally important to the transport of salt and dust in arid regions. We show that they are consistent with the surface expression of buoyancy-driven convection in the porous soil beneath a salt crust. By combining quantitative results from direct field observations, analog experiments, and numerical simulations, we further determine the conditions under which salt polygons should form, as well as how their characteristic size emerges.
Read the full article at: link.aps.org
TANYA ARAÚJO and R. VILELA MENDES
Advances in Complex SystemsVol. 25, No. 07, 2250009
Long-range connections play an essential role in dynamical processes on networks, on the processing of information in biological networks, on the structure of social and economical networks and in the propagation of opinions and epidemics. Here, we review the evidence for long-range connections in real-world networks and discuss the nature of the nonlocal diffusion arising from different distance-dependent laws. Particular attention is devoted to the characterization of diffusion in finite networks for moderate large times and to the comparison of distance laws of exponential and power type.
Read the full article at: www.worldscientific.com
Complexity Digest 