Rating: 
Summary: Truly astonishing introduction to complex adaptive systems
Review: Only a handful of books have changed my life - this is one of them. After you read this book, you will see complex adaptive systems as the organizing principle behind virtually everything - including all life! The book is structured about a historical narrative of the formation of the Sante Fe Institute. This structure is a clever device that enables the reader to easily understand the development of this new science. An absolutely outstanding book.
Rating:
Summary: Next step of Einstein
Review: In fact, I'm living with scientific study but I knew the book ``COMPLEXITY'' by a certain economic magazine of Japan in recently. I read the Japanese version of this book, and I read only few pages of --it's too bad, I didn't bought it from Amazon-- original English version. I can review under this arguments, this book was filled by --perhaps, true ``their'' works are more wonderful-- ``the science of twenty-first century''. But what could be desired of this ``big'' book is a more (?) dose of the jokes. Right, twenty-first century's.
--
Seisei Yamaguchi Hi, Ms Mentholatum the art teacher
山口 青星 美術講師のメンソレさんお元気ですか
http://www.vector.co.jp/authors/VA010205/
Please correct the errors
Copyleft-like
68 lovers capable
Rating:
Summary: Exploratory surgery at the edges of science as we know it!
Review: A capitivating visit to the wonderfully complex and enigmatic Santa Fe Institute. SFI, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, is a special haven among the pinons, where the ear-ned lear-ned scientific elite surf the biggest waves they can find on the turbulent oceans of order, complexity and chaos. The book introduces you biographically to some of these surfers in their unfettered explorations for the big wave and their subsequent new views of life and science. An epiphany
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 book, 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: 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 Unfolding of a New Science.... A Must Read!!
Review: I had Read "Chaos" and was looking for something more... I found it in "Complexity"! Waldrop, a particle Physicist by day, has done a superb job with a potentially dry subject. The work is intellectually stimulating as he weaves the lives of cutting edge biologists, physicists, economists and computer scientists into the story of the founding of the Sante Fe Institute; a complexity think tank located in New Mexico. Waldrop's style is "emergent" in itself as the building blocks to this new science are revealed... no "unfolded" across the page. One comes away with the sense that this is truly the dawning of a new age of science. Many of my own hunches and intuitions were validated as I read. "Yes, Yes" was my reply as I encountered the paradox of competition vs cooperation... of growth vs stasis. This book inspired me to write..."Chaos and order dance together and from the perspective of love and meaning fulfills l! ife" and also... "Truth is the strange attractor of mankind and can only be understood at a level higher than our current reality". The only negative is the lack of coverage in the spiritual area. Many questions come to mind when the complexity theories on the origin of life are detailed. I got the feeling that they avoided this like the plauge.... However, even with this shortcoming this is still a must read! If you are searching for the truth.. start here! You will never be the same!
Rating: 
Summary: No science - just the trivia.
Review: Many popular science books are worthwhile "skimmers". You can hop, skip and speed-read through them to quickly extract the meat. Not so with Complexity, which has almost zero meat. It's 99.5% trivia, from biographical info, to the feelings of mathematicians, to the beauty of sunsets, ad nauseum. There is no math. There is no science. There is nothing to chew on. If you are stuck in a Siberian prison and this is the only book available to read then I warmly recommend it. Otherwise, you may find it a waste of time.
Rating:
Summary: A different kind of book.
Review: In many ways this is a history book. It gives biographies and traces the thoughts of a number of very good thinkers. Along the way it shows how isolated ideas from a great number of people blend together to generalize each other, leading to some amazing ideas.
This is not a technical book. This book is about breadth without much depth. There are few if any formulae in the text. There are only ideas building upon other ideas. Look at it as a broad synthsis without rigor.
To be honest the first several chapters were difficult to read. This part was mainly biographical in nature and there were not enough ideas introduced to catch my interest. After reading more and more, it became very easy to link the ideas into a more interesting cohesiveness. In effect the book follows the traditions of evolving systems by combining what seem to be random bits and pieces to grow into something much more complex and useful. it grows on you.
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 book, 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.
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