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A precise definition could probably be cobbled together using computational complexity. Something like, a phenomenon which results as a product of deterministic
by zardo 11y ago
A precise definition could probably be cobbled together using computational complexity. Something like, a phenomenon which results as a product of deterministic processes that cannot be fully modeled by a polynomial time algorithm.
I think that's what people are really getting at, you can know how every piece of something works, and yet seeing how it works together can be much harder (potentially impossible).
Maybe that just makes it a synonym for chaos theory...
- jessriedel 11y agoYea, I think you're talking about chaos, whereas people are gesturing at something different when they talk about emergent complexity. Vaguely, the idea is that the "regular" degrees of freedom (i.e., the ones that are relatively predictable and from which the important objects are constructed) at large scales are not simply related to the microscopic degrees of freedom. There are probably more rigorous things to say, but it definitely requires more than just unpredictability or sensitivity to initial conditions.