Simplifying Complexity

Today we're joined by Luis Bettencourt, Professor at the University of Chicago, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Luis is going to pull apart how cities work, why they work the way they do, what's good about them, and what's bad about them. He's also going to talk specifically about slums, and the challenges that exist in raising people out of poverty.   Resources and links: Simplify...

Today, we're going to return to the idea of taking concepts from complexity science and applying them to situations in the real world. In this episode, we're joined again by Melanie Moses, Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. She's going to share with us about her recent trip to Iceland to study active volcanoes. More specif...

Orit Peleg is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Orit has been on the show before, to discuss how bees work as a complex system. In this episode, we're staying within the animal kingdom, as Orit talks to us about fireflies. In this episode, Orit is going to explain how thousands of fireflies over very significant areas can...

In our last episode, you heard all about economic mobility. In this episode (which is part 2 of our conversation), you're going to hear again from Matthew Jackson, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. We finished the last episode by saying that if you want to increase a child's economic mobility, the factor that has the gr...

If you're a child born into a poor family in the United States, what are the most important factors in your life that will influence whether or not you're able to rise out of poverty?  To answer that question, we're joined again by Matthew Jackson, William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute.  This is part one of a two-part series...

When a system fails, how do you think about cause and effect? One way to consider this in complex systems is to imagine a pile of sand, and dropping one grain of sand at a time in random positions onto the pile. As time passes, you'll start to form little hills. Eventually, a grain of sand will hit one of these hills, and you get an avalanche. Do you believe that the avalanche was caused by the la...

When most of us think about information, we think of it as something we can possess or ‘know’. But what if it’s so much more than that? In this episode, we’re joined by Sara Walker, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, Associate Professor in Earth and Space Exploration and Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University, and External Faculty at the Santa F...

Imagine you have a bar that comfortably seats 60 people, but every week, 100 people have to decide whether or not they're going to go to the bar on any given night. If too many people go, then the bar is too crowded, and everyone has a miserable night. But if not enough people go, then that's a missed opportunity to go out. This is the basis of the El Farol problem, which asks us to consider how p...

In our last episode, we talked about the four conditions of complex systems: numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback, and non-equilibrium — and we also talked about the concept of emergence. In this episode, which is part two of our two-part series on the features of complex systems, we're joined again by Karoline Wiesner, Professor of Complexity Science in the Department of Physics and Astro...

In most of our episodes so far, we've taken a single concept and looked at it through the context of a single example. But in this episode and the next, we're going to pull back the camera to get a bird's-eye view of complexity science, by exploring the features common to all complex systems. We're joined again by Karoline Wiesner, Professor of Complexity Science in the Department of Physics and A...

In our last episode we talked all about intelligence, specifically about what made us intelligent. In this episode we jump into artificial intelligence, and we're joined again by David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute.  This episode was recorded before the release of GPT-4, so David doesn't mention it specifically, but he does take us...

With the recent release of GPT-4, now seemed like a good time for our episodes on intelligence. And not just artificial intelligence, but intelligence in general. To help us on this journey, we're joined again by David Krakauer, President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. This episode is part one of our two-part conversation with David about intelligence...

If there's one type of music that goes particularly well with complexity science, it's free jazz. The sort of jazz that you get when you put a group of musicians together without a conductor or any written music. But despite this, they still produce incredible music. So how does this group of musicians play so tightly together, whilst creating such dramatic changes to their music? In this episode,...

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,...

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 a...

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 F...

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. Geoffrey will introduce us to the concept of scaling in complex systems, an...

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 complex...

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 kicke...

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...

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 Mex...

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 Economi...

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. She breaks down the characteristic...

A fascinating property of a system's behaviour is its ability to change, and change quickly. For example, how does an economy go from boom to bust so suddenly and unpredictably? That is to say, how does it 'tip' from one behaviour to another? What are these tipping points, and are they really as unpredictable as they seem? In today's episode, we speak to Tyler Marghetis, Assistant Professor of Cog...

What is complexity science, and why should you care about it? Well, complexity science is all about understanding the systems that are all around us — systems like the economy, your body, cities, companies, and the environment. To properly understand how these systems work, and how they fail, you need to understand complexity science. Because complexity science provides us with the underlying prin...