The Internet may be viewed as a "complex system" with diverse features and many components that can give rise to unexpected emergent phenomena, revealing much about its own engineering. This book brings together chapter contributions from a workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute in March 2001. This volume captures a snapshot of some features of the Internet that may be fruitfully approached using a complex systems perspective, meaning using interdisciplinary tools and methods to tackle the subject area. The Internet penetrates the socioeconomic fabric of everyday life; a broader and deeper...

A great variety of complex phenomena in many scientific fields exhibit power-law behavior, reflecting a hierarchical or fractal structure. Many of these phenomena seem to be susceptible to description using approaches drawn from thermodynamics or statistical mechanics, particularly approaches involving the maximization of entropy and of Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics and standard laws in a natural way. The book addresses the interdisciplinary applications of these ideas, and also on various phenomena that could possibly be quantitatively describable in terms of these ideas.

Robust Design brings together 16 chapters by an eminent group of authors in a wide range of fields presenting aspects of robustness in biological, ecological, and computational systems. The volme is the first to address robustness in biological, ecological, and computational systems. It is an outgrowth of a new research program on robustness at the Sante Fe Institute founded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. For those interested in complexity or interdisciplinary science, robustness is seen as currently among the most intellectually active and promising research areas with...

Robust Design brings together 16 chapters by an eminent group of authors in a wide range of fields presenting aspects of robustness in biological, ecological, and computational systems. The volme is the first to address robustness in biological, ecological, and computational systems. It is an outgrowth of a new research program on robustness at the Sante Fe Institute founded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. For those interested in complexity or interdisciplinary science, robustness is seen as currently among the most intellectually active and promising research areas with...

Computer science and physics have been closely linked since the birth of modern computing. In recent years, an interdisciplinary area has blossomed at the junction of these fields, connecting insights from statistical physics with basic computational challenges. Researchers have successfully applied techniques from the study of phase transitions to analyze NP-complete problems such as satisfiability and graph coloring. This is leading to a new understanding of the structure of these problems, and of how algorithms perform on them.

Computational Complexity and Statistical Physics...

Computer science and physics have been closely linked since the birth of modern computing. In recent years, an interdisciplinary area has blossomed at the junction of these fields, connecting insights from statistical physics with basic computational challenges. Researchers have successfully applied techniques from the study of phase transitions to analyze NP-complete problems such as satisfiability and graph coloring. This is leading to a new understanding of the structure of these problems, and of how algorithms perform on them.

Computational Complexity and Statistical Physics...

This book is based on proceedings from a February 2004 Santa Fe Institute workshop. Its contributing chapter authors treat the ecology of predator-prey interactions and food web theory, structure, and dynamics, joining researchers who also work on complex systems and on large nonlinear networks from the points of view of other sub-fields within ecology. Food webs play a central role in the debates on the role of complexity in stability, persistence, and resilience. Better empirical data and the exploding interest in the subject of networks across social, physical, and natural sciences...