Complexity: a guided tour – Melanie Mitchell ****

This book made me want to cheer, because with this title OUP has got it right. I dearly love Oxford University Press, and time after time they come up with popular science books that sound really interesting. Only, when you read them they can be dull and not very well written, often, I’m afraid, because the author is an academic. But this time, in this fascinating guide to complexity, emergent systems, networks and more, they’ve found an author with just the right tone who has the ability to make the subject interesting while still conveying her own interest and involvement in the field.

You may have come across complexity as an adjunct to chaos theory – and chaos is covered in here, but there are so many other things too. In looking at the background, Melanie Mitchell includes the theory of information and computation, plus tying this theory into evolution. She introduces us to genetic algorithms and other computer-based mechanisms for systems to evolve, including the potential for using these approaches in problem solving. We discover cellular automata and an attempt to get computers to understand analogy. And there’s a whole section on the hot topic of networks, from the World Wide Web to the human brain. Time and again we see how simple rules and structures can evolve into complex results that can be difficult to predict in their real world forms.

If I’m picky, Mitchell does occasionally give us too much detail, falling into the ‘boring lists’ trap – and some of the items she covers are presented in too technical a way. There’s also a statement at one point ‘Given a room full of air, at a given instant in time each molecule has a certain position and velocity,’ that would have a physicist cringing – for quantum particles, there aren’t values for the properties until a measurement is taken, and even then the uncertainty principle ensures we can’t know both with any accuracy. But the statement is made in the context of some classical statistical physics, so is almost forgivable.

The reader is probably left with a slight sense of doubt. There seems to be a lot of science here that’s fascinating, but can’t really be used for anything. But that’s not the author’s fault, it just reflects the nature of complexity – at least in our present level of understanding – and Melanie Mitchell’s book will certainly ensure that the reader has a good picture of what it’s all about.

Hardback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

The Random Universe - Andrew Jaffe *****

This is an absolutely fascinating book for anyone interested in the way that science really works, bearing in mind the difficulties of having to base our models and theories on induction. Andrew Jaffe introduces the difficulties we face when trying to take a scientific view because largely we are dependent on induction: predicting the future from what has previously been observed. He explores what probability is, the two key ways of looking at it (frequentist and Bayesian) and how scientists use (or misuse it) to work out the implications of their experiments for hypotheses. This is then expanded into looking at the nature of scientific models and the philosophy of science before heading out to entropy, quantum randomness and attempting to achieve meaningful cosmology with its potential dearth of evidence. The topic might sound a little dry, but in fact Jaffe does it with good humour and a very readable style. For example, he uses measuring his daughter's height by making marks on...

Search This Blog