Collectives and the Design of Complex Systems

Many complex systems found in nature can be viewed as function optimizers. In particular, they can be viewed as such optimizers of functions in extremely high­ dimensional spaces. Given the difficulty of performing such high-dimensional op­ timization with modern computers, there has been a lot of exploration of computational algorithms that try to emulate those naturally-occurring function optimizers. Examples include simulated annealing (SA [15,18]), genetic algorithms (GAs) and evolution...