We develop a unifying approach for complexity measures, based on the principle that complexity requires interactions at different scales of description. Complex systems are more than the sum of their ...

In a recent study in Physical Review Letters, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Aanjaneya Kumar and colleagues show that the ...

The Santa Fe Institute is an independent, nonprofit research and education center that leads global research in complexity science. SFI scientists seek the shared patterns and regularities across ...

Themes are institute-wide research topics that draw together large networks of researchers from the extended SFI network and beyond. Over the course of several years, researchers rigorously engage ...

The adoption and diffusion of new technologies, including those associated with energy distribution and management, requires a deep appreciation of the properties and diversity of social systems.

We propose a theory of asset pricing based on heterogeneous agents who continually adapt their expectations to the market that these expectations aggregatively create. And we explore the implications ...

This paper proves that one can not build a computer which can, for any physical system, take the specification of that system’s state as input and then correctly predict its future state before that ...

Polygyny is thought to be more prevalent where male wealth inequality is greater; however, the decline of polygyny in most of the world occurred with the emergence of capital-intensive farming with ...

The SFI Press endeavors to make available the best of complexity science quickly and affordably, to provide a distillation of discussions, debates, and meetings across a wide range of topics. To ...

Some biological and social systems grow more complex over time—and stay that way. One example of this over evolutionary timescales is the rise of self-replicating RNA molecules from simple organic ...

This is the Santa Fe Institute, a sort of Justice League of renegade geeks, where teams of scientists from disparate fields study the Big Questions.

The rise of the state is a key marker in the evolution of human society. States typically emerged when one chiefdom achieved a greater and more effective level of organization than a competing set of ...