糖心TV Complexity Science Events
Complexity Centre and MathSys CDT events carry priority over room D1.07.
To book D1.07 please email Sheetal dot Sharma at warwick dot ac dot uk
Please note that your event booking is for D1.07 only. The adjacent common room is a private area for the MathSys Centre that cannot used as part of your booking.
Complexity Forum- Seth Bullock
Speaker: Seth Bullock (Southampton)
Title: Does spatial embedding scaffold complexity?
Abstract:
How is the topology of a complex network related to the complexity of the behaviour exhibited by the system it represents? This talk reports current theoretical work on a measure of complexity introduced by Tononi, Sporns and Edelman within the neuroscience community (TSE complexity). The measure is an attempt to capture the notion that, in complex systems, components of the system work together to achieve more than the sum of their parts, and that this tends to be true at many levels of description.
By deriving a graph-theoretic interpretation of the measure, we are able to determine the graph properties that encourage high complexity. We show that spatial embedding can be expeceted to generate graphs with these properties. This analysis also allows us to understand why TSE complexity has sometimes been associated with the small world property. More broadly, the work suggests that spatial embedding might be a natural way for evolution (and human design) to "scaffold" the complex behaviour of "engineered" systems.