Complexity and Information: Measuring Emergence, Self-organization, and Homeostasis at Multiple Scales

Concepts used in the scientific study of complex systems have become so widespread that their use and abuse has led to ambiguity and confusion in their meaning. In this paper we use information theory to provide abstract and concise measures of complexity, emergence, self-organization, and homeostasis. The purpose is to clarify the meaning of these concepts with the aid of the proposed formal measures. In a simplified version of the measures (focusing on the information produced by a system), emergence becomes the opposite of self-organization, while complexity represents their balance. Homeostasis can be seen as a measure of the stability of the system. We use computational experiments on random Boolean networks and elementary cellular automata to illustrate our measures at multiple scales.Comment: 42 pages, 11 figures, 2 table

Writing in Britain and Ireland, c. 400 to c. 800

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Innovations of the NetSolve Grid Computing System

The NetSolve Grid Computing System was first developed in the mid 1990s to provide users with seamless access to remote computational hardware and software resources. Since then, the system has benefitted from many enhancements like security services, data management faculties and distributed storage infrastructures. This article is meant to provide the reader with details regarding the present state of the project, describing the current architecture of the system, its latest innovations and other systems that make use of the NetSolve infrastructure. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEY WORDS: Grid computing; distributed computing; heterogeneous network computing; client–server; agent-based computin