Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprise
Explores how complexity arises, showing how the universe consists of unpredictable "dynamical systems" so subtle that human logic cannot fathom them and laying the ground work for a "science of surprise"
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Popular science author and mathematician Casti writes for the lay audience about five reasons why everyday systems display surprising, counterintuitive behavior: catastrophes (small changes leading to big shifts in behavior), chaos (rules that generate apparently random results), uncomputability (behaviors that defy characterization by any set of rules), irreducibility (a system that is more than the sum of its parts), and emergence (patterns arising from collective interactions). Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
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