The Four Conditions of Complex Systems: Numerosity, Disorder/Diversity, Feedback, & Non-Equilibrium

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Now, in part one, we're going to look at the four conditions that we see in complex systems. They are numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback and non-equilibrium. And then at the end of the episode, we're going to pull the four of those together and look at a central concept in complex systems, a concept of emergence.

In most of our episodes so far, we've taken a single concept and looked at it through the context of a single example. But in this episode and the next, we're going to pull back the camera to get a bird's-eye view of complexity science, by exploring the features common to all complex systems.

We're joined again by Karoline Wiesner, Professor of Complexity Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam in Germany. In this episode, Karoline is going to explain four conditions that we see in complexity science: numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback, and non-equilibrium. At the end of the episode, she's going to bring them all together to explain a central concept of complex systems: emergence.

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