I too am a camp follower following the bread crumb trail.

After looking at Herbert's wiki, I feel like I've been creeping around his ideas for much of my life without realizing he was the progenitor, to the point where a few comments ago I used a word he invented. Krakauer's ideas too really resonate, these guys are really onto something.

Tentatively dipping a toe into complex adaptive systems and the Sante Fe institute also keeps coming up time and time again, they seem to have captured everybody thinking about this in depth.

Does anybody have good leads on Krakauer and Simon's ideas? e.g. books for a dive into?

Hoping for a Adaptive Complexity for Dummies!

> After looking at Herbert's wiki, I feel like I've been creeping around his ideas for much of my life without realizing he was the progenitor

I had this exact feeling as well. Herb thought at the exact same level of abstraction that I like to think in, broadly construed as "models", not too rigorous to be mathematics, but not too loose to be raw observational psychology. Just right. Marvin Minksy is precisely the same but for AI systems rather than humans.

Krakauer's website is where I would read Krakauer: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~krakauer/Site/Publications.html

Scott E Page and his "Model Thinking" course on Coursera is in the same vein as these two. He's a complexity theorist that deals with proper representation of social networks and distributed decision-making. His books "The Difference" and "Complex Adaptive Systems" are academic but extremely readable, and don't harken after the same Cellular Automata and Chaos examples without at least operationalizing them into some application first.

Thanks!

I just tracked down a whole mess of Simon's publications through Worldcat yesterday after responding on this thread. Organizations and hist book on adminstration seem like the two main ones.

I'm not sure regarding Krakauer, though I'm pretty positive he's published. SFI are _quite_ good about posting papers and such online, something I discovered after scanning in two books on a 30s/page scanner.... (I've since found faster scanners to use...) Though the published papers don't have the full formulae and typesetting of the published work.

Thanks, I'll check those out. Krakauer has a book on protocells, looks like a general overview of new ideas about self starting life plus computational ideas since Miller-Urey experiments. My trepidation is that I don't know if I'd require a PhD in biological science to understand it. I'm reading through some of his articles at the moment and they're all interesting.

> Though the published papers don't have the full formulae and typesetting of the published work.

Maybe email the author.