Simplifying Complexity

Imagine you were going to Mars with a swarm of robots, and you needed to send those robots out foraging. How would you program them? A traditional top-down approach to programming would mean programming what every single robot is going to do, and that's going to get complicated fast. 

So in this episode, we're joined by Melanie Moses, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute...

In the last few episodes, we learnt all about scaling laws or power laws and how they apply to mammals. In this episode, the final part of our discussion of scaling and complex systems, for now, we're looking even bigger. 

We're joined again by Geoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Former President of the Santa Fe Institute, who in this episode will be leaving mammals behind to look at other complex systems...

In our last episode, you heard all about the relationship between a mammal's weight and its metabolic rate, and how this holds true regardless of the size of the mammal. You heard other examples of so-called scaling laws, and how these laws seem to be guided by the number four.

In this episode, we're joined again by Geoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Former President of the Santa Fe Institute...

Have you ever thought about why the average human lifespan is 80 years? Or why smaller animals, like mice, live for much shorter periods compared to large animals like blue whales? 

To help answer these questions, we're joined by Geoffrey West, Shannan Distinguished Professor and Former President of the Santa Fe Institute...

One of the things that make complexity science so fascinating is the diversity of the systems that it applies to. In this series so far, you've learnt about everything from ecologies to economies, tipping points in ecologies and economies, to power and influence in the 1400s, and even the spread of coronavirus in the lungs and the thing that brings all of these different topics together is complexity...

In our last episode, we heard from W. Brian Arthur, who shared his journey in economics as he studied increasing returns. Now, Brian's going to take us to 1987, to a small meeting in the Rockies in Santa Fe. At this time, he was struggling to gain recognition for his work within the economics community, but it was when Brian went to what would become the Santa Fe Institute that things really kicked off.

In this episode, you're going to hear again from W...

Mitchell Waldrop's 'Complexity' brought complexity science into the limelight with an account of the early days of the Santa Fe Institute. One of the people who appear in this book is W. Brian Arthur, the engineer turned economist who found economics unsatisfactory — because it treated the economy purely as a system in equilibrium when he knew it very obviously wasn't.

In this episode, you'll hear from W...

How do you model a complex system? Traditionally we would observe how the system is behaving and create equations to mimic this behaviour, but this doesn't work for complex systems. This is because the interactions between agents in a complex system can significantly impact the system's overall behaviour.

In today's episode, Melanie Moses, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, will answer this question...

A key part of complexity science is understanding the behaviour of networks. Networks are groups of interacting agents, and they're all around us; our friendship groups, our colleagues, and even interactions online are all examples of networks. But what role does influence and power play in these networks? 

In today's episode, we're joined by Matthew Jackson, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute...

In our last episode with Tyler Marghetis, we learnt about how a complex system can tip from one state into another. But what happens when systems don't tip or fail? What makes a system robust?

In today's episode, we're talking with Karoline Wiesner, a Professor of Complexity Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam, Germany...