> Yet when I ask for a formal treatment, I get no answer.
I very much like Hubler's deceptively simple definition of complexity:
"A complex systems is a system with large throughput of Energy,
Information, Force, .... through a well designed boundary."
His notes from the SFI CSSS school with this definition are here:
http://www.how-why.com/ucs2002/tutorial/
As a restatement of the same ideas that formalizes what "large" means, I would
offer:
"complexity emerges when a gradient acting on a system exceeds the
capacity of the internal degrees of freedom of the system to dissipate the
gradient".
Is that formal enough? or, does the statement need to be mathematized?
-Steve
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