At yesterday's FRIAM, I mentioned the Chaos has the luxury of reasonably formal techniques, much lacking in Complexity. My point was that there was an "inclusion principal" for chaos .. a way to partition processes into those that are chaotic and those that are not. And naturally, neither set is null.
The technique used in Chaos is the Lyapunov exponent: http://hypertextbook.com/chaos/43.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_exponent A similar measure, as far as I know, is not available for description of Complex systems .. one that offers a solution to the inclusion principal for Complex processes. BTW: We were having difficulty remembering the name of the author of one of the more popular books. I believe we were searching for Robert Devaney. He is editor of the Studies in Nonlinearity series of books, which includes a rather interesting one by Brian Davies which has a wonderful set of Java applications/applets for exploring chaos .. a sort of lab if you will. -- Owen Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net - http://redfish.com - http://friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
