Rating: 
Summary: Easy to Read, Powerful To Ponder
Review: Complexity is one of those rare science books that manages to teach the reader a great deal without boring them to tears. Using the Santa Fe Institute and many of it's founding players as the backdrop for the story, Waldrop tells stories about people, while exploring their science. The result is a book that is fun to read, and that makes you think at a deep, deep level.The gist of complexity is the notion that nature really does explore, all by itself, the continously evolving boundary between order and chaos. If you've ever explored the boundaries of fractal patterns, such as the Mandelbrot Set, you've seen a visual example of complexity at work. When you're done, you realize that you have a better intuitive understanding of how the universe operates, how evolution works, and how societies organize themselves...all without having to solve a single mathematical equation! I loved it! This is one of those books that reshaped my world view, and it is one that I highly recommend to any reader, regardless of their scientific background.
Rating:
Summary: So much about our pluralistic world-the fine line-clarified!
Review: I am neither a physicist nor an economist. College mathematics was difficult for me. I understand now that my intellectual strengths are not analysis but synthesis; I can see the whole picture;I am a generalist. I taught reading, English and composition, hands-on problem solving math, social studies, and natural science to fifth and sixth graders. I believed in Dewey's learning-by-doing methods. I am creative in music and writing and encouraged creative thinking. IF YOU ARE THIS KIND OF PERSON and yet curious to know more about the cutting edge of physical science as it relates to the humanities, society and the economy, then the book, Complexity, by Mitchell Waldrop is enlightening reading. The biographical sketches help relate the participants in the Sante Fe Institute to the reader who is a layman regarding advanced science and math. As an elementary educator I especially appreciated the sections on the brain and the evolution of learning. My belief that cooperation and competition play more or less and equal role in human activity was reinforced as I read about the development of complex, dynamic systems. Finally, The concept of complexity suggests a surprising connection between physics and spirituality. To me, it provided a scientific rationale for my personal ethics which call for balance and adherence to the golden rule.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for Science groupies - no description of theory here!
Review: I found it impossible to tolerate the hundreds and hundreds of pages of oggeling the great men of science and the mundane minutia of thier careers, personalities and personal lives. There's not a single equation or chart in the whole book.
Look elsewhere if you want to get up to speed on the "new science".
Rating: 
Summary: A must read!
Review: This book is not about a mathematical explanation of complexity. This book will not teach you how to construct a neural network or create autonomous cellular automata. This book is about the process that some of the world's best scientists went through to realize why a theory like complexity is needed. The book will give any reader a deeper understanding for, and appreciation of how such a broad and information rich topic like complexity is becoming better understood. Insights are also given into how this new understanding of emergent behavior may soon be applied to what were once considered unsolvable problems of Economics, Artificial Life, Biology, Physics, etc. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos is the story of a group of humans trying to understand the very nature of nature itself, a superhuman task. An exciting drama that just happens to be about cutting edge science instead of science fiction.
Rating:
Summary: THE best popular introduction to complexity
Review: I work for a company that is commercializing some applications of complexity science, so I've read a heap of "popular" books on the subject. This is far and away the best: Waldrop gives some entertaining historical background on the Santa Fe Institute, but the "meat" of the book is complexity science and its implications, and his descriptions are clear, easy to understand, and accurate. He not only tells you what complexity science is but WHY you should care about it -- and by doing that, he goes far beyond most other popularizers. The book is a little dated now, but not seriously, and I still recommend it to people as the best general introduction to the subject. (For those wishing to delve a little deeper, Stuart Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe" goes more into the technical side of complexity science while still remaining very readable.)
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful reading for every science enthusiast!
Review: The cover of the book says " If you liked Chaos, you will love complexity". I just finished reading the booking, that validated the claim. While Chaos is written as story of discovery of a new science, Complexity excels as a saga of men who ventured into previously unchartered domains addressing for the first time issues like: What is life? What is driving force that caused cells to appear from a primordal soup of all elements, when the probability of so happening is infinitesimal? What causes evolution? Do nice guys finish last? What makes evolution, coevolution, adaptation, extinction work? Why do we organize ourselves into families, cultures, nations? Why do stock markets crash, boom? What controls the emergence of economies? Why can USSR go from one of strongest nations/economies to the state of divided helplessness in less than a few years? Why are we here? What is life? Artificial Life? Are we still evolving? What is the cause of increasing complexity? On mundane level: What is non-linearity? What is Chaos? If this science is all that important, why did we wait this long for recognizing it? What are the paradigms in which sociology and physics settle into same patterns? How neural networks were born, brought up and mastered? This novel/book is as much about these questions as it is about the scientists who engaged in unravelling many of these mysteries. It speaks about their failures and successes, their approach, ethic and driving force, their fears, fights and friendships. For most part it reads like a thriller, and by the time you are done, you find yourself searching for another book on Chaos, complexity, life at the edge of chaos, genetic algorithms, artificial intelligence. After just 358 pages, your imagination and knowledge of science leaps from Newton's linear models to the twentyfirst century stuff.
Rating:
Summary: Well written introduction to complexity
Review: Excellent, well written introduction to complexity. It was exactly the book I was looking for to help me develop an understanding of the concepts of things complex. As a novice, I have had difficulty finding material that would be accessible - this book definitely fits that bill. My only complaint was the extensive time devoted to the development and maintenance of the Santa Fe Institute itself. Although somewhat interesting, I believe the author went too far.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant
Review: For me as a software developer that is interested in self-organization, adaptation, complex systems, et cetera, this book was immensely satisfying. I'm interested in how this applies to software development, both in terms of the process of developing a system, and how to grow/evolve software instead of build according to plans (which is an approach that I think is deemed to fail). I'm adding this to my list of recommended reading for programmers.
Rating: 
Summary: Novel
Review: The first chapter was quite frankly utterly stupendous, especially if you love Economics. The rest of it is a lot of rough descriptions of what happenned in Santa Fe. Shame really, had the rest of the book been like the first chapter, it would've been amazing.
Rating:
Summary: a view on today's science
Review: how the edge of the world of science looks today. an insight on where we stand and what we are looking for in the third millennium.
given in a clear, insightful and informed way. you only need be interested in the topix to understand it, and it goes a long way in making a book of science good for everyone.
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