Complexity: A Guided Tour
by Melanie Mitchell · first published 2009
75% recommend25% neutral
Why HN recommends it
A broad, example-driven tour of complex systems research. It is a brief, readable introduction with a long bibliography, suited to newcomers and a starting point for further reading.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive questions that the science of complexity seeks to answer. In this remarkably accessible and companionable book, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate, detailed tour of the sc
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The Pattern on the Stone by Danny Hillis (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pattern_on_the_Stone) Complexity a Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell (https://melaniemitchell.me/BooksContent/CAGTReviews.html)
on “Ask HN: Books Similar to Code by Charles Petzold?” ↗…backbones of complex systems, so it's worth delving into. Graph theory/topology is a close second. Complex Networks by Latora, Nicosia, and Russo is a nice introduction to the graph-theoretical perspective. Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell is a nice and brief introduction. I can also recommend Spin Glasses and Complexity by Stein and Newman. Spin glasses are basically the "model organism" of complexity science, so it…
on “Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems” ↗Along with Meadows' Thinking in Systems I read Mitchell's Complexity: A Guided Tour, which is just that - a reasonably superficial tour over many examples. It's a very good starting point since it's got a long bibliography.
on “Ask HN: Any recommended resources to develop system thinking?” ↗Melanie Mitchell’s “Complexity: A Guided Tour” is a superb introduction to this area. And while I’m plugging her books, her latest one is one of the best-written lay-audience books about machine learning and AI that I’ve seen. I strongly recommended…
on “Introduction to Cybernetics (1957)” ↗…behaving like a thinking system. That’s the whole point of complex systems theory, chaos theory, and even early AI work like Hofstadter and Dennett. I recommend "Gödel, Escher, Bach", or Melanie Mitchell's "Complexity: A Guided Tour", if you're curious. If you're arguing there's something else, some kind of unphysical or non-emergent component to knowledge or creativity, I'd honestly love to hear more, because that's a bold claim.…
on “What can we take away from the ‘stochastic parrot’ saga?” ↗…almost all historian accounts - modernized many institutions over the subsequent hundreds of years (eg, from cutlery to math and science). I think the most relevant book on the west’s success is called complexity: a guided tour
on “Scientists put Jared Diamond's continental axis hypothesis to the test” ↗…re-read Bill Gates' Business @ The Speed of Thought[8]. Once I finish that, I'm hoping to find time to squeeze in The Art of Enterprise Information Architecture[9] and - if things go smashingly well - Complexity - A Guided Tour[10]. 1: http://shindig.apache.org 2: https://github.com/fogbeam/Quoddy 3: http://www.opensocial.org 4: https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick 5: http://www.amazon.com/Googled-End-World-As-Know/dp/014311804...…
on “Ask HN: What are you working on over the winter break?” ↗"Introduction to Complexity" by Melanie Mitchell from Santa Fe Institute. https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/185-introduction-... This free course is based on her book "Complexity: A Guided Tour" https://www.amazon.com/Complexity-Guided-Tour-Melanie-Mitche...
on “The new math of how large-scale order emerges” ↗