From: erkin@nynexst.com (Erkin Cubukcu)
Subject: A Book Review
Organization: NYNEX Science & Technology, Inc.
Date: Mon, 4 Jan 93 14:34:14 GMT



A BOOK REVIEW  

Recently I  was  looking  for  a  book on chaos theory in the library.  The
librarian, during the computer search, found a book with the word chaos  in
its title.   When I first flipped the pages of the book I thought that this
was not the type of book I was searching for.  What I had in my mind was  a
math book with some thoerems and problems.  The book I was browsing was all 
like  a  story.    However, as I started reading the first few paragraphs I
felt like reading more.  I borrowed the book (359 pages)  and  finished  in
three and a half days over the extended Christmas weekend.  I put aside all 
the  other  things  I  was  doing  at  the  time  on  hold.    The book was
fascinating.  I have never written a book review in my life.  However, this 
book prompted me to do that.   

The name of the book is "The Emerging Science at  the  Edge  of  Order  and
Chaos",  written  by M. Mitchell Waldrop and published by Simon & Schuster;
its ISBN number is 0-671-76789-5. I would like emphasize that this is not a 
science fiction book.   

The author, Mitchell Waldrop, in its opening paragraph says "This is a book 
about  the science of complexity - a subject that's still  so  new  and  so
wide-ranging  that  nobody  knows quite how to define it, or even where its
boundries lie.  But then, that's the whole  point.    If  the  field  seems
poorly defined at the moment, it's because complexity research is trying to 
grapple  with  questions  that  defy all the conventional categories."  And
then he poses some questions.  I quoted these questions below  to  give  an
idea what the book is all about and why it was so interesting for me.   

"*  Why  did  the  Soviet  Union's  forty year hegomony over Eastern Europe
collapse within a few moths in 1989?  And why did the Soviet  Union  itself
come apart less than two years later?  Why was the collapse of communism so 
fast  and   so  complete?  It surely had something to do with two men named
Gorbachev and Yeltsin. And yet even they seemed to be swept  up  in  events
that were  far beyond their control.  Was there some global dynamic at work
that transcends individual personalities?   

* Why did the stock market crash more than 500 points on a single Monday in 
October  1987?  A lot of the blame goes to computerized trading.   But  the
computers had  been  around  for  years.  Is there any reason why the crash
came on that particular Monday?   

* Why the ancient species and ecosystems often remain stable in  the  fosil
record  for  millions  of  years  -  and  then  either die out or transform
themselves into something  new  in  a  geological  instant?    Perhaps  the
dinosaurs got wiped out by an asteroid impact.  But there weren't that many 
asteroids.  What else was going on?   

*  Why  do  rural  families in a nation such as Bangladesh still produce an
average of seven children apiece, even birth rate control  is  made  freely
available - and even the villagers seem perfectly well aware of how they're 
being   hurt  by  the  country's   immense   overpopulation   and  stagnant
development?  Why do they continue in the  course  of  behavior  that's  so
disastrous?   

*  How  did  a  primordial  soup  of amino acids and other simple molecules
manage to turn itself into the first living cell some  four  billion  years
ago?   There's  no  way  the  molucules  could have just fallen together at
random; as the creationists are fond of pointing out, the odds against that 
happening are ludicrous.  So was the creation of life a miracle?   Or  was
there  something  else going on in that primordial soup that still we don't
understand?   

* Why did individual cells begin to form alliances some 600  million  years
ago,  thereby  giving  rise  to  multicellular  organisms  such as seaweed,
jellyfish, insects and eventually humans?  For that matter, Why  do  humans
spend  so much time and effort organizing themselves into families, tribes,
communities, nations  and  societies  of  all  types?    If  evolution  (or
freemarket  capitalism)  is  really  just  a  matter of the survival of the
fittest, then why should it  ever  produce  anything  other  than  ruthless
competion among  individuals?    In  a  world where nice guys all too often
finish last, why should there be any such thing as  trust  or  cooperation?
And  why,  in  spite of everything, do trust and cooperation not only exist
but flourish?   

*  How  can  Darwinian  natural  selection  account  for  such  wonderfully
intracate structures  as  the eye or the kidney?  Is the incredibly precise
organization that we find in living creatures really  just  the  result  of
random evolutionary accidents?  Or has something more been going on for the 
past four billion years, something that Darwin didn't know about?   

* What is life, anyway?  Is it nothing more than a particularly complicated 
kind  of  carbon  chemistry?  Or is it something more subtle?  And what are
we to make of creations such as computer viruses?    Are  they  just  pesky
imitations of life - or in some fundamental sense they are really alive?   

* What  is  a  mind?    How does a three-pound lump of ordinary matter, the
brain, give rise to such ineffable qualities as feeling,  thought,  purpose
and awareness?   

*  And  perhaps  most  fundamentally,  why  is  there something rather than
nothing?  The universe started out from the  formless  miasma  of  the  Big
Bang.  And  ever  since  then  it's been governed by an inexorable tendency
toward disorder, dissolution and decay as described by the  second  law  of
thermodynamics.  Yet the universe has also managed to bring forth structure 
on  every  scale:  galaxies,  stars,  bacteria, plants, animals and brains.
How?  Is the cosmic compulsion for disorder matched by an equally  powerful
compulsion for  order, structure and organization?  And if so, how can both
processes be going on at once?"   

The questions go as if we are about to start reading a philosopy or science 
fiction book or a book on religon, don't they.  But as mentioned this is  a
book on science 

The  book  tells the story of an institute, named "The Sante Fe Institute",
founded in New Mexico in mid-1980s, 35 miles to the (in)famous  Los  Alamos
lab,  by  George  Cowan  and  other well known scientists in the US. George
Cowan, has the feeling, like the other scientists who are involved in  this
project,  that  the  complex  systems,  whether  in  physics, microbiology,
economics or social sciences, have some common characteristics.   They  are
adaptive,  i.e.,  adjust  to  the  environment,  in  other  words  they are
self-organizing.  They also evolve and get more  complex  as  time  passes.
This seems  inevitable  (not  a chance).  They are in a state, which can be
described as neither static  (orderly)  nor  chaotic.    You  may  call  it
quasi-static or  quasi-chaotic.   Elements of these complex systems neither
closely fit together nor split and go in different directions randomly.  So 
he  decided to bring the  best  minds  in  different  disciplines  such  as
physics,  microbiology,  economics  and  social sciences in an institute so
they share their experience in their fields with each  other  and  exchange
ideas, in long brain storming sessions and maybe, yes  maybe,  come up with
theories  which  explain  these  mind  boggling  and  seemingly  irrelevant
phenomena.   

Since  the  systems, the scientist dealt with in the workshops of the Santa
Fe Institute,  are  so  complex,  scientist  couldn't  come  up  with  neat
analytical solutions  to the problems, at least not yet.  They haven't been
able to develop elegant theorems to prove their  ideas  either  (again  not
yet).  But they drew many conclusions.  

One  of  the main conlusions the scientists came to is that complex systems
are networks of simpler things which they called  "agents".  (These  agents
could also  be networks of some simpler agents, etc.).  In some cases it is
easy to see the network structure, as in  case  of  brain.    In  a  neural
network the      node-and-connection  structure  is  obvious.    The  nodes
correspond to neurons  and the connections correspond to synapses,  linking
the neurons.    If  we  look  carefully we see that DNA molecules also have
network structure.  Here, genes are the nodes of the network.  The messages 
which genes send to each other are the connections between them.    In  the
case  of organisms the nodes  correspond to cells and the connections again
correspond to the messages exchanged between them.  And I guess there is no 
need to tell that social and economic systems are also networks, with nodes 
corresponding   to   the   humans   and/or   companies   and  relationships
(communication) between them corresponding to the links (connections).

Another interesting conclusion they came up with is that  the  information/
behavior  associated  with  a  network  is stored/coded in the connections,
i.e., the way they are connected and  their  strength,  as  it  happens  in
neural networks.  For example, to train a neural network you need to adjust 
the  strength  (weight)  of links.  Whereas  the nodes are just adders that
switch to a binary state according to the sum of the weighed inputs.   

The conclusion that the behavior of a network is coded in  the  connections
gives  rise  to  the  concept  of  "emergence". Basically it means that the
network acquires some behavior (characteristics) which does  not  exist  in
each  agent  (node).  For example, the genes in a DNA cell by themselves do
not give any clue how the cell forms and they do not  tell  whether  it  is
going to  be  a  kidney cell or a muscle cell.  Futhermore the genes do not
have any idea how the cell  will  grow  or  how  the  tissues  will  repair
themselves when damaged.  All this information is the result of the way the 
genes turn each other on-off by sending messages.   

The  concept of  emergence is shown in a computer simulation in artificial-
life lab.  In this experiment the bird-like agents are created.  These  are
called "boids" by their  creators. Each boid follows three simple rules  as
given below: 

1. It  will  try  to  maintain a minimum distance from other objects in the
   environment, including other boids.   

2. It will try to match velocities with boids in its neighborhood.   

3. It will try to move toward the perceived center of mass of boids in  its
   neighorhood.   

As  can  be  seen  from above there is no rule saying that the boids should
form a flock.  The  rules  are  local  only,  dictating  the  realtionships
(connections) between  boids.    When  the  program  is  run, to everyone's
amazement the boids form a flock.  If an obstacle is placed on  their  path
they will even split and merge after passing the obstacle.   

In another attempt to see how the systems behave Stuart Kauffman devised an 
experiment.   He modeled genes as flip-flops which have only two states, on
and off. In his experiment he had determined that the number  of     cycles
for   the   system   to   settle   after  a  random  initial  state  scaled
roughly  as  the  square  root  of  the  number  of  genes  in  the network.
As the number genes is increased it took longer for the system  to  settle.
He  had  also determined that if the number of connections between genes is
small (i.e., lightly connected) the sytem settles easily, which corresponds 
to orderly state, whereas as the number of connections increases  it  takes
longer  to  settle  and  if  the  connections are increased furthermore the
system never settles, i.e., shows chaotic behavior.  (This behavior is seen 
in nonlinear  dynamic systems [chaos theory, math]).

If you read the book you'll see that how an idea,  one  of  the  scientists
came up with, triggered a whole set of new ideas, how they tested their new 
ideas  by  means  of computer simulations to understand these phenomena and
finally you'll learn all the conclusions they came up with.   In  the  book
there is no mathemetical expression.  Only the scintists who designed these 
simulations  explain  the  logical  reasoning  behind it and how they wrote
simulation.  In  this  respect it is very easy to read  with no theorems or
problems to pause to understand.

Anyways, I strongly recommend this book.  I  am  sure  you'll  find  it  as
exciting  as I found if the questions similar to the ones asked above keeps
nagging you.


-- 
Erkin Cubukcu                          Ph#:     (914) 644-2876
NYNEX Science & Technology, Inc.       Fax#:    (914) 644-2237
500 Westchester Ave. Rm# 2F-9B        e-mail:  erkin@nynexst.com
White Plains, NY 10604
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