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Smart Browser, Where Art Thou?

In 1998, I got my hands on Mitchell Waldrop's book called 'Complexity'. Ever since, I've been on an amazing journey discovering one of the most profound developments in modern science. Complexity, or more formally, the study of complex systems, is about unifying themes that run through all modern scientific disciplines including physics, biology, economics, ecology, linguistics, and sociology.

John Holland, one of the fathers of complexity science, coined the term Complex Adaptive Systems to characterize ant colonies, societies, cells and ecosystems. He pointed out that the agents in these systems are adapting to the surrounding environment by building models and by learning. And as Jeff Hawkins summarized in his book 'On Intelligence', the human evolution has been about the progressive invention of various forms of memory. Genes, brains, language and books are all examples of this.

It is obvious that memory plays a critical role in human intellect and human interactions. Yet today our interactions with computers, and the web in particular, are disappointingly stateless. We keep going back to the Google search box and re-entering the same stuff over and over again. The computer simply has no idea what we are looking for and how to help us find it. Ah, you'd say, but how can it? Don't we need artificial intelligence for that? My claim in this article is that no, we do not. Instead, we need to get inspiration from complexity science and focus on usability and productivity.

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Catharsis
On the Art of Medicine
Andrzej Szczeklik

The Rhythm of the Heart
The world around us is overflowing with rhythms. We are always coming into contact with them, from the moment we are born. The rocking of the cradle and the singing that goes with it are both rhythms; so are the flash of a lighthouse beam and the roar of waves crashing against the shore, the rattle of a train and the croaking of frogs by the tracks. The world’s rhythms pervade us, bringing in their own meter and stirring a response. Among primitive peoples rhythm is associated with the beginning of life. On the Polynesian islands a god molded a figurine of woman-as-the-mother out of clay and then danced before her for three days and three nights. Drums accelerated the rhythm, while with every movement of his dancing body he implored and incited her. Until finally—as Czesław Miłosz writes—matter could no longer maintain its own inertia. The first shudder of rhythm ran through the figurine, waking her from an ageless sleep. Her first response was shy: she stuck out one knee, testing to see if she were really made of something other than earth.

Or maybe the rhythm beaten out on the drums came from deep inside the universe? Was it perhaps aroused by signals flowing from interstellar space, steady and regular, emerging from inside rapidly rotating colossi that make our sun look like a speck of dust? Known as neutron stars, these gigantic concentrations of matter, the sources of powerful magnetic and gravitational fields, send radio waves of great intensity into the universe—and to us as well. They are typically so perfectly regular that the centers where they arise are called pulsars. So is it impossible to imagine that the pulsars imposed their rhythm on the beating drums, and that the first pulse of blood that ran through man, stirring him into life, was a response to their rhythm? Was the human pulse set off by the pulsars of the universe?

www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/788695.html

Complex Systems is a new field of science studying how parts of a system give rise to the collective behaviors of the system, and how the system interacts with its environment. Social systems formed (in part) out of people, the brain formed out of neurons, molecules formed out of atoms, the weather formed out of air flows are all examples of complex systems. The field of complex systems cuts across all traditional disciplines of science, as well as engineering, management, and medicine. It focuses on certain questions about parts, wholes and relationships. These questions are relevant to all traditional fields.

Why Complex Systems?

The study of complex systems is about understanding indirect effects. Problems that are difficult to solve are often hard to understand because the causes and effects are not obviously related. Pushing on a complex system "here" often has effects "over there" because the parts are interdependent. This has become more and more apparent in our efforts to solve societal problems or avoid ecological disasters caused by our own actions. The field of complex systems provides a number of sophisticated tools, some of them concepts that help us think about these systems, some of them analytical for studying these systems in greater depth, and some of them computer based for describing, modeling or simulating these systems.

Three approaches to the study of complex systems:
There are three interrelated approaches to the modern study of complex systems,
(1) how interactions give rise to patterns of behavior,
(2) understanding the ways of describing complex systems, and
(3) the process of formation of complex systems through pattern formation an evolution.

Copyright © 2000 Yaneer Bar-Yam All rights reserved.