The Necessity of Disorder & Randomness in Complex Systems

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Key takeaways

Transcript

Episode notes

Disorder and diversity are important behaviors of a system which is somewhat random and beneficial for the system to adapt and react to unknown things
Randomness is necessary for systems to explore and discover new information, as in the case of end colonies or the immune system
Disorder and randomness are necessary conditions, not something we wish wasn't there, for structure to arise in complex systems

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.

Resources and links: