ANUPhysicsSS2008LectureNotes

From COSNet

1 Discussion page for authors of the Summer School Proceedings volume
- 1.1 Themes
  - 1.1.1 Complex systems
- 1.2 Key words

Discussion page for authors of the Summer School Proceedings volume

Summer school Menu

(to be published in the series World Scientific Lecture Notes in Complex Systems)

Contributors to this page so far: Bob Dewar, Mike Wheatland

This page is supplementary to the Publication of Proceedings page http://wwwrsphysse.anu.edu.au/ccs/SUMMERSCHOOLS/SS22/proceedings.shtml .

It has been added to help implement Ian Enting's suggestion that we should aim to integrate the different chapters by referring to some common themes and by using a common set of indexing terms (in addition to ones appropriate only to your chapter).

You, as a contributor to the Proceedings, are encouraged to help develop this common vocabulary by using the Wiki edit tab at the top of the page (see Help:Editing).

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Themes

(adapted from Tomaso Aste's Introduction to Complex Systems lecture)

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Complex systems

exhibit emergence: some properties present at system level are not present at lower level — e.g. a cell is alive but is made of inanimate elements
are open: energy and information are constantly being imported and exported acoss system boundaries
have a history: the history cannot be ignored, even a small change in circumstances can lead to large deviations in the future
can adapt: in response to external or internal changes, the system can reorganize itself without breaking — self organizing
are not completely predictable: when a system is adaptive, unexpected behaviours can emerge — prediction becomes expectation
are multi-scale and hierarchical: system size and structure scale are over several orders of magnitude and distinct properties and functions are associated with different scales; dynamics can propagate through scales — avalanches, cascade effects
are disordered: there is no compact and concise way to encode the whole information contained in the system
have multiple (meta) (stable) states: small perturbations lead to recovery, larger ones can lead to radical changes of properties; dynamics do not average simply.