Chaos & Complexity LO892

Doug Seeley (100433.133@compuserve.com)
23 Apr 95 05:12:48 EDT

Replying to Jim Michmerhuizen LO860 and Valdis Krebs

Jim, you were questioning the limited value of the vocabulary from chaos
and complexity, especially when applied outside their domain of origin....

In a way it seems to be a similar concern to much of the criticism applied
to General Systems Theory decades ago, and it is important to avoid
superficial understandings disguised by the use of chaos metaphors.
However, trying to abstract generic concepts and understandings from such
endeavours, has been a major contribution to intellectual endeavour... it
is like sourcing new ideas for mathematics not just from the isolated
playpens of academic circles, but from our encounter with life itself.

I think it is important to keep trying to extract the generic
distinctions, concepts, and principles from such areas. For example, I
did some work a couple of years ago in a specialized branch of the area
now being called Complex Systems (artificial life, neural networks,
behaviour-based Artificial Intelligence, genetic algorithms, etc.). I was
looking at the emergence of connectivity in randomly evolving networks.
This Complex Systems area is "the study of the dynamic behaviour of
systems characterized by many similar richly interacting components, which
may also have a rich interaction with their environment."

The situation was this: you take a collection of nodes (people, particles,
InterNet nodes, or ideas, etc.) and randomly add connections (I was
studying 1-way connections) to this collection, studying the connectivity
properties of the collection. That is, what proportion of nodes are
connected indirectly (as well as directly) to all of the other nodes.
This is called the evolution of random digraphs.

In this situation, the emergence of connectivity of the (almost whole)
system is truly remarkable. It goes from a system which is weakly
connected to a system which is very strongly connected in a very short
time (number of added connections). Moreover, there a number of other
connection properties which also emerge in a very sudden manner, including
for example, the number of circuits within the system. It really seemed to
us, who were interested in what was underlying the inflationary episode of
the Big Band, that this sudden emergence of connectivity was what
underlies all Phase Changes. Subsequently I discovered a Complex Systems
group in Biology in Australia, who had been looking at the same thing.
[Complex Systems in Biology, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in
1995] and [The Origins of Order, Oxford University, 1993]

As a result of this work, there is a plausible explanation behind the
emergence of order as a result of phase changes in the connectivity of
underlying systems which from my point of view (including personal work on
discrete system dynamics, the architeture of object-oriented software, and
as a therapist in Geneva) applies universally.

Cheers, Doug Seeley

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Dr. Doug Seeley: compuserve 100433,133... Fax: +41 22 756 3759
InterDynamics Pty. Ltd. (Australia) in Geneva, Switzerland
"Integrity is not merely an ideal; it is the only reality."