Complexity

November 25, 2011 — April 11, 2015

statistics
statmech
(Sir Menelik)

Can science achieve a unified theory of complex systems?
Permanently skeptical of friends of the institute
External faculty: A routine that exerts selective pressure
By killing less fit programs, life evolves in cyberspace.
Green and blue objects in self-replicating lightning
Represent random mutations, completely chaotic systems
Such as turbulent fluids or heating gases are formless.
Truly, complex amino bond traders appear at the border
Between rigid order {?} torturing stick to terms compiled
Among a list of 31 ways to define — “Grammatical”:
The degree of universality in a language required to describe a style
“Effective”: The degree of regular, rather than random, information.
For instance, complexity equals the capacity of an unexpected observer.
“Thermodynamic depth”: the amount of resources to put back a system
Together from scratch, pioneering, engineering, cybernetic cellular calculus
Cooperating flatly contradicting predictable circumstances
Including uranium-235, is obtained, for bomb fission

[…]

[Kool Keith] + (Sir Menelik)
Is light the source? (Touch my delicate instruments)
Is light the source? (Touch my delicate instruments)
Is light the source? (Touch my delicate instruments)
Is light the source? (Touch my delicate instruments)

Can we get a general measure of ‘complexity’ of things in the real world that make intuitive sense to us? (e.g. that human beings are more complex than an onion, and, I dunno, market capitalism is more complex than socialism or indeed provided rationalization for whatever is our favourite ideology.)

Short answer: No. I think this question as a general one is dead, and we are dealing now with some well-defined domain-specific ones, such as

1 See Also

2 References

Delétang, Ruoss, Duquenne, et al. 2024. “Language Modeling Is Compression.”