Complexity: A Guided Tour [Hardcover]

Melanie Mitchell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0195124413 | ISBN-13: 978-0195124415 | Publication Date: April 1, 2009

What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive questions that the science of complexity seeks to answer.

In this remarkably accessible and companionable book, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate, detailed tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. Comprehending such systems requires a wholly new approach, one that goes beyond traditional scientific reductionism and that re-maps long-standing disciplinary boundaries. Based on her work at the Santa Fe Institute and drawing on its interdisciplinary strategies, Mitchell brings clarity to the workings of complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that apply to all of them. She explores as well the relationship between complexity and evolution, artificial intelligence, computation, genetics, information processing, and many other fields.

Richly illustrated and vividly written, Complexity: A Guided Tour offers a comprehensive and eminently comprehensible overview of the ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for the field's contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our time.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

“All theoretical models are wrong, but some are useful.” Both inevitable error and promising usefulness abound in the bold conceptual models that Mitchell surveys in exploring the nascent science of complexity. Readers will marvel at the sheer range of settings in which complex systems operate: from ant hills to the stock market, from T cells to Web searches, from disease epidemics to power outages, complexity challenges theorists’ intellectual adroitness. With refreshing clarity, Mitchell invites nonspecialists to share in these researchers’ adventures in recognizing and measuring complexity and then predicting its cascading effects. Concepts central to thermodynamics, information theory, and computer programming all come into focus in this foray into the recesses of complexity. Still, the analysis illuminates more than explanatory frameworks (such as network diagrams and genetic algorithms); piquant personalities (including Stephen Jay Gould and John von Neumann) also receive illuminating scrutiny. Though Mitchell acknowledges the doubts of skeptics, she still expresses hope that persistent complexity researchers will yet weld their disparate accomplishments into a coherent paradigm. Mind-expanding. --Bryce Christensen

Review

"Melanie Mitchell's book is most enjoyable, truly inspiring, skillfully written, and, above all, beautifully clear. The author's enthusiasm and passion for the field make the book fascinating to read. Her rigor, clarity, and healthy skepticism make the book sound and the field scientifically stronger. It is an excellent and rigorous account of the scientific field of complexity. She proves by example that it is possible to explain complex systems science with rigor, breadth, depth, and--above all--exquisite clarity."--Artificial Life

"Complexity: A Guided Tour is well written and engaging, laced with candid humor and occasional blunt remarks about some of the major characters in the field. It is a fine introduction to complexity science and could serve as a first-rate text for an advanced course for undergraduates and an excellent guide for courses at the graduate level. Experts and nonspecialists alike will have a hard time putting it down."--Physics Today

"A well-written, easy to understand, and entertaining piece of popular science."--Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines

"Perhaps one of this generation's standard introductions to the exciting worlds of the sciences of complexity."--Emergence: Complexity and Organization

"Complexity stands out from other popular science books by mentioning recent discoveries and theories from genetics. Readers may enjoy Mitchell's personal perspective and her inclusion of recent research. Readers who have not been introduced to the ideas explored in Complexity will find the content fascinating."--Mathematical Association of America Reviews

"Mitchell's tour will be a helpful introduction to those in various disciplines who seek a gentle introduction to this emerging specialty."--Computing Reviews

"The author, a denizen of the community of complexity researchers, provides an engaging introduction to the many interdisciplinary issues surrounding attempts at understanding how fantastic holistic attributes can arise from teems of underwhelming components -- how minds arise from simple neurons and cagey ant colonies from embarrassingly thick-headed individual ants. If Mitchell's book were required reading for undergraduate freshmen, I would anticipate a large surge in the number of students interested not only in complexity, but interested in science more generally. And not just more students, but students more exercised about what may lie ahead as they attempt to come to grips with nature."--Quarterly Review of Biology

"The best popular science books are those that give the reader the sense of looking over the shoulder of a leading researcher doing cutting-edge work at the frontier of scientific inquiry. Isaacson's recent biography of Einstein belongs in this category. So too does Melanie Mitchell's Complexity: A Guided Tour."--The Oregonian

"How can something be dependent and autonomous at the same time? And why do so many systems in nature show this hierarchical organization? No on has answered these questions, but in Complexity, computer scientist, Melanie Mitchell...offers a valuable snapshot of the growing field of complex-systems science from which the answers may eventually arise."--Nature

"The book succeeds in buckling down much of the field's ambiguity, along with its role in the scientific community. And refreshingly, while laying out the surprisingly diverse set of fundamental theories that compose the framework for studying complex systems, Mitchell never oversteps the achievements of what her field has actually produced."--Bookslut

Listed in "Nature: Physics," Volume 5, May 2009

"This volume is an engaging and lucid introduction to complex systems...Mitchell is able to succinctly describe core ideas and discoveries...Useful to advanced students and researchers in adjacent areas."--CHOICE

"An enthusiastic, sincere, and knowledgeable guide."--Science

"Melanie Mitchell's Complexity is essential reading. It's a book whose capacity to inspire delight in your own intelligence makes Mitchell's work akin to instructions for a Sol Lewitt drawing. With attentive reading, you'll soon produce a competent understanding of "sensitive dependence on initial conditions," leap millenia of physics, and turn a sharp corner with history." --The Magazine of Yoga

"There is assuredly something in this book for everyone. With its generally clear writing and fine bibliography, for the uninitiated, Melanie Mitchell's Complexity is a great way to take a first voyage to the complex system of complex systems...It left me, and will surely leave any open-minded traveler, eager to continue to learn about this relatively unexplored and fertile world." -- Dan Rockmore, American Mathematical Society

"In summary, this book is a superb introduction to the science of complexity. The evolution in the ways science enquiries are made, as has been discussed in the book, has led us to
think about things in much more holistic way than what we had started with. This tour is
worth every single penny. I recommend it to everyone interested in complexity sciences." -- Complexity

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (April 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195124413
• ISBN-13: 978-0195124415
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #330,044 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #99 in Books > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > System Theory

More About the Author

Melanie Mitchell was born in Los Angeles, California. She attended Brown University, where she majored in mathematics and did research in astronomy, and the University of Michigan, where she received a Ph.D. in computer science, working with her advisor Douglas Hofstadter on the Copycat project, a computer program that makes analogies. She is currently Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and does research in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two sons. Melanie blogs about complexity at http://exploringcomplexity.blogspot.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

136 of 136 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best introduction to complexity I know of, May 13, 2009

By 

Irfan A. Alvi (Towson, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Complexity: A Guided Tour (Hardcover)

This book is easily the best introductory "guided tour" of complexity I know of. It has several key strengths:

1. Mitchell covers many of the major topics which can reasonably be grouped under the umbrella of complexity, so the breadth of the book is excellent. For my benefit and yours, here are the main topics covered, roughly in the order they appear in the book: chaos, information, thermodynamics, Godel's theorem, Turing machines, evolution, genetics, measures of complexity, fractals, self-reproducing automata, genetic algorithms, cellular automata, artificial life, information processing in living systems, analogy-finding algorithms, game theory, networks, power laws, metabolic scaling, random boolean networks, and historical foundations of complex systems research (cybernetics, general systems theory, synergetics, etc.). This long list leaves out some significant complexity topics, but Mitchell's scope is still plentiful for an introductory guided tour.

2. The topics are covered in sufficient depth to clearly convey the key concepts, which reflects the fact that Mitchell is a scientist who really knows the subject. Though the treatment is certainly introductory, rest assured that this isn't a superficial journalistic popularization which drops lots of names and terminology without getting into any real content.

3. Mitchell's writing style is concise and precise, but still friendly and not at all terse. The book is quite easy to read if you have a decent background in general science.

4. General readers will appreciate that there isn't much formal math in the book, yet Mitchell explains things in a way that nicely intimates the outlines of the math for readers who are math-savvy.

5. Mitchell's presentation is sober and honest. She naturally highlights the potentials and promise of complex systems science, but she also openly acknowledges its past dead ends and likely future limitations.

6. There are biographical notes interspersed throughout the book, which adds a nice human touch.

For completeness, I'll note that I did notice a few technical errors in Mitchell's initial discussion of immunology. But these errors don't invalidate the general message, and can be overlooked, considering the overall excellence of the book.

The bottom line is that I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in complexity (how could you not be?). It's a perfect introduction for beginners, and people well-versed in the subject will also appreciate the convenience of having a high-quality broad overview within the covers of just one book.

107 of 112 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gentle but thought-provoking introduction, March 14, 2009

By 

L. Allen (Florida, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Complexity: A Guided Tour (Hardcover)

From reviews of the book that appear on the back cover:
"...scholarly yet entertaining..."
"...best general book on this topic."
"...entertains and informs all the way..."

I agree with all of the above. Unlike many books on complexity, this book is easy to read and highly accessible to general readers. More importantly to me as a graduate student, this book is more fascinating and in many ways more thought-provoking than math-heavy textbooks for specialists/academics.

I bought the book because of my interest in artificial intelligence, and I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in artificial intelligence, computer science, or biology. What I like most about the book is that it provides me with a fresh perspective/synthesis that pulls together what has been going on in different fields and subfields. For example, in computer science, we are taught all the time about how important it is for programs to be able to scale, but we are not given a biological perspective of how genes scale so well. This book does that in it's chapter on scaling.

Each chapter includes historical perspectives and/or real-world examples. For example, the chapter on genetic algorithms includes a quick survey of the companies and organizations that have recently benefited from using them.

The book also includes a chapter on why computers are still pretty dumb (lack general intelligence). The chapter reiterates that analogy understanding may be the holy grail to developing artificial general intelligence. (Like most people, I agree with the author that artificial general intelligence, AGI, is not going to happen anytime soon.) Some relevant info about the author from Wikipedia: "She received her PhD in 1990 from the University of Michigan under Douglas Hofstadter and John Holland, for which she developed the Copycat cognitive architecture. She is the author of "Analogy-Making as Perception.""

43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb overview of Complexity, May 7, 2009

By 

Karen Detweiler "Karen" (Vienna, VA United States) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Complexity: A Guided Tour (Hardcover)

This book really lives up to its title, "Complexity: A Guided Tour." Dr. Mitchell has turned her Santa Fe Institute lectures on the foundations of Complexity into a very interesting, readable book suitable for academics, professionals, students, and interested laypeople. She explains how complexity fits into the history of scientific knowledge. She relates it to the rapidly expanding field of information science, as influenced by biological rather than mechanical models. She even explains how computer models relate to living systems as information processors.

Having read many scholarly papers on these topics, I can vouch for the clarity and accuracy of her work. She certainly doesn't need any endorsement, though; as a successful doctoral student under the renowned Doug Hofstadter and now a professor at Santa Fe, she is in the inner circle of complexity scientists today. If only her book had come out a year or two ago! It puts in one place many ideas we used to have to search out and integrate on our own!

One note: the mathematics of complexity science can be daunting. Dr. Mitchell has done a terrific job expressing & explaining those concepts. Unlike many of the complexity books in print, hers is both intelligent and accessible. Highly recommend it!