Complex adaptive systems

Holland, J. H. (1992). Complex adaptive systems. Daedalus, 121(1), 17-30.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1992

Volume

121

Issue

1

Pages

17-30

Link

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025416

Cited from

biology_ecology, systems_cybernetics

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Adaptation
  • System with modifiable structure. The system has aspects — traits, parameters, behaviors, structures — that can change over time, either across generations (biological), within a lifetime (learning), or across design iterations (engineered).

    This sourceDefines complex adaptive systems by their constrained but modifiable internal models; identifies adaptive capacity as a function of internal-model variability and selection bandwidth.

• Complex Adaptive System
  • Holland characterized such systems by large populations of adaptive or learning agents, while Levin emphasized the cross-scale relation between microscopic processes, macroscopic patterns, and evolutionary forces.
• Emergence
  • Holland (1992) demonstrated that genetic algorithms capture emergence through adaptive agents governed by simple rules, producing complexity without centralized direction

    This sourceDefines complex adaptive systems built from interacting adaptive agents whose global behavior emerges from local rules (Holland's genetic-algorithm lineage) (Prime's annotation was a leftover from adaptive_capacity; corrected here.)

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