Complexity: A Guided Tour
ISBN:9780195124415 read summary

Complex systems are characterized by many interacting agents following simple rules that can exhibit complicated behavior. Melanie Mitchell provides an excellent survey of the emerging field of complexity, much like her Introduction to Genetic Algorithms. Math is relegated to end notes, so the read is one any educated person can enjoy without being bogged down with equations.

I bought this book hoping that I would be entertained by the science. Instead, I was bored by the dry delivery and lack of new material and thought. The graphs and charts were of low quality, and looked like something made at home on an 80s era PC. This suggests that the book was hastily assembled and no effort was made to improve the graphics. On the whole, this seems like a college textbook - the kind that your professors force you to buy - but with an attractive dust cover.

I stopped reading it about halfway through out of boredom so it is possible there is something of interest later in the book. On the positive side, the author is enthusiastic and the topic could be made interesting. Maybe a rewrite would help...

When reading this book in conjunction with my self-organization class was quite interesting. If you read the book for many of the topics it helps me to concentrate on the idea of entropy. If you follow this general flows many of the topics become clear and you grasp much more of what is going on. You might take away research ideas like I did.

This book is subtitled "A Guided Tour," and that is exactly what it is---a guided tour of the ways and byways of complexity theory written by an expert who is perfectly at home with the subject and yet uncommonly capable of making contact with the novice reader and drawing him or her along with the tour.

Mitchell's goal is not to turn the reader into a complexity researcher---a far more rigorous treatment of computer science, mathematics, physics, and the behavioral sciences would be required for that. Nor is her goal to explain advanced professional-level contributions made possible by agent-based modeling and neural networks. Rather, she has succeeded in revealing to the reader some dimensions of physical and social reality that they may have never known existed.

As several reviewers have asserted, there is nothing better in the literature for a balanced view without hype and oversell.

I very much enjoyed reading this book. A friend introduced me to the concept of complexity and somehow I stumbled on this book. It really is an outstanding overview of the world of complexity, and provides a very good overview of the critical points, including history of the discipline, key sub-disciplines, etc. It provides enough to whet your appetite, provides you a basic understanding of complexity, and gives you some insight as to where to go next if you want to learn more. I would add that in some cases the technical discussions are inconsistent. In some places the author provides a comprehensive and readily understandable explanation of an example, whereas in other cases she skips some of the more salient points. Nonetheless, the book is geared to a very un-technical reader, so be aware of that. If you're looking for a deeply technical discussion, look elsewhere. However, it is useful for it currency in discussing current research topics.