Complexity: A Guided Tour Summary and Reviews

Complexity: A Guided Tour
by Melanie Mitchell

Complexity: A Guided Tour
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Book Summary Information

Author: Melanie Mitchell
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-04-01
ISBN: 0195124413
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Book Reviews of Complexity: A Guided Tour

Book Review: 'Gas' - Greek Word for Chaos & Complexity For The Masses
Summary: 3 Stars

Is Chaos and Complexity just based on two simple ideas - the sensitivity of a system to its starting conditions, and feedback? As the author details in full context, we do not yet have the proper lexicon for terms of chaos or complexity that truly describe the theory and systems discussed in the book. However, we conveniently now use the terms such as complexity, chaos, cellular automatons, scale-free networks and etcetera, but which may change in the future. This tour explores those terms and their associated concepts. Though it appears that some folks in the business have taken the author to the woodshed, based on some of the reviews, I on the other hand - as an 'autodidact' - found the book flowing and helped me with some of concepts that I had previously misunderstood.

The author also details in full that all the subjects discussed are not the end all, be all, but as an introduction to the concepts or guided tour as the title suggests. What was nice in my view was that Dr. Mitchell provides the counter points or opposing views on several of the subject matters presented which was a welcomed addition.

If you enjoy reading Complexity - A Guided Tour, as this book is a good introductory start on the subject matter of self-organizing systems, power laws, and stuff of complexity -- I also recommend the following which you may like too: Ubiquity (Very Good), Black Swan (Economic Game Changer), Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics (Introduction to Fractals, Power Laws), and Deep Simplicity (A Classic).

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