An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and Its Applications

Figure 1

Each column contains three examples of systems consisting of the same components (from left to right: molecules, cells, and people) but with different relations between them. Each row contains systems representing a certain kind of relationship between components. For random systems, the behavior of each component is independent from the behavior of all other components. For coherent systems, all components exhibit the same behavior; for example, the behavior (location, orientation, and velocity) of one part of the cannonball completely determines the behavior of the other parts. Correlated systems lie between these two extremes, such that the behaviors of the system’s components do depend on one another, but not so strongly that every component acts in the same way; for example, the shape of one part of a snowflake is correlated with but does not completely determine the shape of the other parts. Implicit in these descriptions is the necessity of specifying the set of behaviors under consideration, as discussed in Section 2.2. (Image source: [2]).