This book provides the first clear, comprehensive, and accessible account of complex adaptive social systems, by two of the field's leading authorities. Such systems - whether political parties, stock markets, or ant colonies - present some of the most intriguing theoretical and practical challenges confronting the social sciences. Engagingly written, and balancing technical detail with intuitive explanations, "Complex Adaptive Systems" focuses on the key tools and ideas that have emerged in the field since the mid-1990s, as well as the techniques needed to investigate such systems. It provides a detailed introduction to concepts such as emergence, self-organized criticality, automata, networks, diversity, adaptation, and feedback. It also demonstrates how complex adaptive systems can be explored using methods ranging from mathematics to computational models of adaptive agents. John Miller and Scott Page show how to combine ideas from economics, political science, biology, physics, and computer science to illuminate topics in organization, adaptation, decentralization, and robustness. They also demonstrate how the usual extremes used in modeling can be fruitfully transcended.

将带领读者进入千奇百怪、绚丽多彩的“相变世界”：从物质三态变化、铁磁、铁电、液晶相变，到玻色一爱因斯坦凝聚、超流和超导。书中还把平衡态相变的概念推广到其他系统，包括几何相变和非平衡相变。全书通过对相变和临界现象的介绍，阐述热力学和统计物理的基本概念，从熵的引入、统计配分函数，到对称破缺、标度律和普适性。同时也描述了研究相变现象的基本理论方法，包括平均场近似、标度分析、重正化群、统计模型精确解和计算机数值模拟等，还介绍了相变研究的最新进展，如有限系统的临界现象和量子相变。

本书是按照钱学森关于系统科学“三个层次一座桥梁”的体系框架结构撰写的，试图以最少的版面把系统科学的基本内容作一完整而精练的展示。本书的主旨不在于提供描述系统的完整、精确、实用的建模理论和方法，不追求数学工具的高深和漂亮，而在于帮助读者把握系统科学的基本思想、原理和方法论，了解系统科学前沿的可能生长点。本书的主要读者群设定为人文社会科学的研究生、博士生以及同等学力者，也希望对于系统理论和系统哲学的研究者能有所启示。

From the Internet to networks of friendship, disease transmission, and even terrorism, the concept - and the reality - of networks has come to pervade modern society. But what exactly is a network? What different types of networks are there? Why are they interesting, and what can they tell us? In recent years, scientists from a range of fields - including mathematics, physics, computer science, sociology, and biology - have been pursuing these questions and building a new 'science of networks.' This book brings together, for the first time, a set of seminal articles representing research from across these disciplines. It is an ideal sourcebook for the key research in this fast-growing field. The book is organized into four sections, each preceded by an editors' introduction summarizing its contents and general theme. The first section sets the stage by discussing some of the historical antecedents of contemporary research in the area. From there the book moves to the empirical side of the science of networks before turning to the foundational modeling ideas that have been the focus of much subsequent activity. The book closes by taking the reader to the cutting edge of network science - the relationship between network structure and system dynamics. From network robustness to the spread of disease, this section offers a potpourri of topics on this rapidly expanding frontier of the new science.

A variety of different social, natural and technological systems can be described by the same mathematical framework. This holds from the Internet to food webs and to boards of company directors. In all these situations a graph of the elements of the system and their interconnections displays a universal feature. There are only few elements with many connections, and many elements with few connections. This book presents the experimental evidence of these "Scale-free networks" and provides students and researchers with a corpus of theoretical results and algorithms to analyse and understand these features. The content of this book and the exposition makes it a clear textbook for beginners, and a reference book for the experts.