The Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Various authors: The Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems October 26, 2005

If you have been following the discussion with David Merrill on ITForum, a discussion which has touched on the distinction between simple and complex systems, you will find this site to be worth a read. "Complex systems can be identified by what they do - display organization without a central organizing principle (emergence) and also by how they may or may not be analyzed - decomposing the system and analyzing subparts does not necessarily give a clue as to the behavior of the whole". More...