Simply Complexity summary

Complex systems are a curious thing in that the phenomena that arise from it, such as traffic jams or market crashes, can occur even without any governance or coordination. Rather, the collection of objects (or people) is actually self-organized, making phenomena seem to crop up as if by magic.

Complex systems are able to bring about changes in their own behavior, which can range from fairly random to rather extreme.

We often come across the terms “complexity” and “chaos” together, which gives off the impression that they are essentially the same. But that’s not true.

Chaos can actually be a result of complexity: it’s a specific example of a complex system’s output.

As we have seen, a crowd is a complex phenomenon. It arises from a collection of people, and people are complicated in their preferences, thoughts and behavior.

But it turns out that the ways in which we are complicated as individuals might not be so important in group situations. Interestingly, when we are in a large enough group, our individual differences actually cancel out each other.

We are social animals. We make private contacts and form alliances and coalitions. Simply put, we create networks. And in our networks, we know who is connected to whom, and therefore who is interacting with one another and what their interactions are.

We are surrounded by networks on a daily basis, for instance transportation, information, social and voting networks. What defines a network is a set of nodes that are connected by links. For example, in a social network, individual people form a set of nodes and their contact forms the link between them.

In a market, the traders, or “individual objects,” are each attempting to predict price movements in order to decide whether to buy or sell. But there is one significant problem: financial markets are complicated dynamic systems that are continually changing in ways that elude most experts.

That’s because the standard prediction model for financial markets is flawed.

Finding Mr. or Mrs. Right can be hard: first, our mate needs to actually exist in the world at the same time as we do. Second, the timing has to be right – we might desire a someone who wasn’t right for us in our past but would be now and the opportunity is gone. In other words, dating is complex!

But there’s another hurdle that we must overcome in our search for the ideal partner: we aren’t the only ones looking.

Aside from coming together to form complex systems that consist of just regular groups or crowds, we are, unfortunately, equally as capable of forming complex systems that are violent – the most striking example of which is war. War functions as a complex system because several groups of people are simultaneously fighting for some kind of gain, typically a limited resource, such as land, or political, social and economic power.

One way in which this struggle can become even more convoluted is when more than one side is fighting in the same war, which leads to rising asymmetry in warfare.