Learn, hack!

URL

http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/CCCamp07/video/m4v/cccamp07-en-1968-Life_Complexity.m4v

File name

cccamp07-en-1968-Life_Complexity.m4v

File size

338.7 MB

MD5

245885c30d0f031de0a08fc079071b00

SHA1

a14e301dc7e22a9486718e05fd294345d2129f2b

What is the relationship between energy, information and complexity? How does nature organise itself, and why? How does evolution get from a bacteria to, say, a wombat? How far are we in understanding and simulating life and other complex systems? Although many of these questions are still largely unanswered, some interesting advancements have been made in recent years and decades. A number of these will be discussed and illustrated in this lecture. Why are organisms and ecosystems the way they are? While science has made great advances in explaining how the parts of such systems work, surprisingly little is still known about why and how the building blocks of living systems and their interactions actually came about. In recent decades we have begun to realise that phenomena such as self-organisation and 'emergent' properties of complex systems play an important role. Unfortunately such systems do not lend themselves very well to study by traditional scientific methods, hence the name 'complex systems'. The arrival of fast computers in the last two decades has made it possible to actually simulate the behaviour and evolution of large collections of simple 'agents'. This, coupled with advances in other fields such as genomics, thermodynamics, and information theory, has made that we are slowly beginning to understand why 'complex systems' behave the way they do.