蚂蚁在组成群体时为何会表现出如此的精密性和具有目的性？数以亿计的神经元是如何产生出像意识这样极度复杂的事物？是什么在引导免疫系统、互联网、全球经济和人类基因组等自组织结构？这些都是复杂系统科学尝试回答的迷人而令人费解的问题的一部分。
理解复杂系统需要有全新的方法.需要超越传统的科学还原论，并重新划定学科的疆域。借助于圣塔菲研究所的工作经历和交叉学科方法，复杂系统的前沿科学家米歇尔以清晰的思路介绍了复杂系统的研究，横跨生物、技术和社会学等领域，并探寻复杂系统的普遍规律，与此同时，她还探讨了复杂性与进化、人工智能、计算、遗传、信息处理等领域的关系。

本书是诺贝尔经济学奖得主司马贺的代表作之一，是1996年修订出版的第三版的中译本。第三版增加了全新的一章“复杂性面面观”，修改了文字内容并更新了部分数据。
作者率先构造出“人工科学”的概念，据以将经济学、思维心理学、学习科学、设计科学、管理学、复杂性研究等领域贯穿联系起来，使人获得很多启迪。本书对传统思维提出挑战，指出人工智能所期望达到的领域，揭示了人工性和层级对于复杂性的意义，从多个领域说明人工科学何以是可能的，并试图说明它的性质。本书的基本主题是：物质符号系统具备必要和充分的手段来采取智能行动。

As science probes the nature of life, society, and technology ever more closely, what it finds there is complexity. The sophisticated group behavior of social insects, the unexpected intricacies of the genome, the dynamics of population growth, and the self-organized structure of the World Wide Web - these are just a few examples of complex systems that still elude scientific understanding. Comprehending such systems seems to require a wholly new approach, one that goes beyond traditional scientific reductionism and that re-maps long-standing disciplinary boundaries. This remarkably accessible and companionable book, written by a leading complex systems scientist, provides an intimate, detailed tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. In this richly illustrated work, Melanie Mitchell describes in equal parts the history of ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for the field's contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our current century.