BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

COMPLEXITY THEORY 1)2)

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Complexity has been first considered under the following aspects:

- Organismic complexity as described by L.von BERTALANFFY in his fundational work based on biology.

- Structural complexity as for example by J. MILLER in his "Living Systems", including the study of critical subsystems and the different levels of complexity.

- Hierarchic complexity as for example by K. BOULDING in his classification of systems, or H. SIMON in his "Architecture of complexity"

- Dynamic complexity as first considered by H. POINCARÉ in his three bodies problem, a work whose all embracing importance was not understood until the emergence of chaos theory.

A more elaborated theory of complexity appeared in recent years, particularly through the work of St. KAUFFMAN, J. HOLLAND, C. LANGTON and others, who see, as any systemist, complexity as the result of interactions between elements, but are unraveling the ways these interactions work through the study of the behavior of networks, according to variegated individual rules.

Complexity has also been considered from a new viewpoint in thermodynamics of irreversible systems by I. PRIGOGINE and the Brussels and Austin's teams which he organized.

→ Artificial life, Connection machine, Network behavior, Neural network

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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