Tag Archives: Complexity

When No Agent Can See the Whole System

A group of agents can coordinate successfully without any member possessing a complete picture of the system in which it acts. This essay examines the gap between collective performance and collective understanding. Through a search and rescue thought experiment, it argues that more agents do not automatically create more knowledge when their observations share the same blind spots. Distributed intelligence becomes epistemically stronger only when it preserves dissenting local models, records discarded possibilities, tests system boundaries, and creates routes for genuinely new evidence to enter. The central question is not whether a network can produce coherent behavior, but whether it can detect what its own architecture prevents it from seeing.

On Complexity and Consciousness

Neil Theise is a Professor of Pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Through his scientific research, he has been a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity and the anatomy of the human interstitium. Dr. Theise’s book, ‘Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being’ (Spiegel & Grau, 2023) calls on his studies in complexity theory to address topics such as consciousness studies and science-religion dialogue. In this interview he discusses his life, ideas and work.

The next frontier is not artificial intelligence, it’s artificial societies

Professor Nick Jennings is an internationally-recognised authority in the areas of AI, autonomous systems, cyber-security and agent-based computing. He was awarded the 2026 Research Excellence Award by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
His research focuses on developing agentic AI systems for large-scale, open and dynamic environments. In particular, he is interested in how to endow individual autonomous agents with the ability to act and interact in flexible ways and with effectively engineering systems that contain both humans and software agents.
Nick is passionate about the real-world impact of research and his systems have been deployed to save lives in the aftermath of disasters, to win Olympic medals for TeamGB, and to monitor the impact of climate change on glaciers.
He has also been involved with a number of start-ups including Aerogility, Darktrace, Sentient Sports, Reliance Cyber Systems, Trans Humanity and is a board member of Midlands Mindforge.

Fragments Aligned

Sohrab Crews’ experience of a range of different geographical and cultural contexts has had a strong bearing on his work, as has his significant interest in post-war European avant-garde art, American painting and sculpture, and mixed-media practices of all kinds. His own work manifests the recurrent themes of order and control, structure, colour and expressive intensity, notably through his ongoing experimentation with a wide range of ideas, mediums and techniques.

Mathematics of scale: Big, small and everything in between

Mitchell Newberry is a Research Assistant Professor of Biology, University of New Mexico. He is a computational biologist and complex systems scientist whose research spans population dynamics, the evolution of language and culture, the maintenance of diversity in ecosystems, and vascular morphology, while contributing to the nuts and bolts of software and statistics. His work appears in Nature, Physical Review Letters, Royal Society Interface and Theoretical Population Biology as well as Popular Science, Buzzfeed and the Atlantic.

Extraterrestrial life may look nothing like life on Earth − so astrobiologists are coming up with a framework to study how complex systems evolve

Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. He has over 180 refereed publications on observational cosmology, galaxies, and quasars, and his research has been supported by $20 million in NASA and NSF grants. He has won eleven teaching awards, and has taught three massive open online classes with over 180,000 enrolled. Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society and he has been an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, Carnegie Council’s Arizona Professor of the Year, and most recently, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He’s written over 70 popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology, two introductory textbooks, a novel called ‘Shadow World’, and eight popular science books: ‘The Living Cosmos’, ‘How It Ends’, ‘Talking About Life’, ‘How It Began’, ‘Dreams of Other Worlds’, ‘Humble Before the Void’, ‘Beyond: The Future of Space Travel’, and ‘Einstein’s Monsters: The Life and Times of Black Holes’.

Contemplating Complexity

“Complexity is the underlying focus of my work. My work is not rigidly representational but rather it’s suggestive of the very real and very complicated parts and systems that compose and surround us but that cannot be seen by the naked eye. Using motifs from microbiology, I experiment with material, scale, and replication to create abstract biomorphs of vivid color, hyper-texture, and dedicated detail.”

Drawing on her experience with ceramics, fabric, and sculpture, Amie Esslinger’s paintings and distinctive mixed-media installations attempt to bridge the gap between art and science.

The maths behind ‘impossible’ never-repeating patterns

Dr Priya Subramanian is a Research Fellow at the Department of Mathematics, University of Leeds. Her interests lie in understanding mechanisms that govern spatio-temporal patterns and emergent behaviours in systems such as thermacoustic systems, transistional (convective/shear) flows of fluids and motion of active organelle filaments. Currently, she is looking at formation of quasipatterns; patterns that possess discrete spectra despite having no translational symmetries.

Patterns and the visual system of the fruit fly ‘Drosophila’.

Dr Iris Salecker is program leader in the Division of Molecular Neurobiology at the Medical Research Council National Institute for Medical Research in London (now part of the Francis Crick Institute). Her current team studies the mechanisms underlying visual circuit assembly in Drosophila, with a special interest in axon-target and neuron-glia interactions. In this exclusive interview she discusses her ideas and work, and her collaborative project with artist, Helen Pynor, for the ‘Deconstructing Patterns’ exhibition.