How Efficient Is The Financial System?
Background
In 1948 Claude Shannon wrote a paper entitled ‘The Mathematical Theory of Communication,’ later expanding this into a book by the same name. Shannon’s work was the foundation to the stunning achievements of information theory. In many respects, Shannon’s work deserves recognition as the foundation of complexity theory as well. Continue reading
Autonomous Networks, Traffic Control and Intelligent Agents
Brit Cruise
Autonomous, self-organizing, adaptive systems
A popular question in physics, chemistry and biology is “where does order come from?”. The general laws of thermodynamics tell us that systems will follow the path of least resistance to dissipate any energy they contain. Eventually the system finds its lowest energy state and will remain in equilibrium until acted upon by an outer force.
Yet in nature we can observe many systems that maintain a high internal energy and organization which seems to defy the general laws of physics. An ant grows from a singled celled zygote into a complex multi cellular organism, and then participates in a highly structured hive society. What is so fascinating is that the organization seems to emerge spontaneously from disordered conditions. The laws that may govern this self-organizing behavior are not well understood, if they exist at all. It is clear that this non-linear process is based on positive and negative feedback loops among components at the lowest level. Continue reading
Brit Cruise 