Some computers are easy to spot. Artificial, human-built computers like those found in smartphones and laptops are abstract ...

A new study in PNAS introduces a mathematical model that quantifies how different systems, from cells to organizations, ...

SFI External Professor Santiago Elena has been elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, joining 62 other fellows in the class of 2026, each selected for their contributions in the ...

Mark Twain wrote, “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” InterPlanetary seeks to restore focus at a planetary scale. What terrestrial challenge could provide greater ...

Whenever an authority has influence over a population — be it a social media platform moderating user comments, a government imposing laws on its citizens, or an employer placing restrictions on ...

The Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS) offers an intensive introduction to complex behavior in mathematical, physical, living, and social systems. Spanning four weeks, CSSS ...

Popular and academic books and chapters, authored or edited by SFI researchers. The contemporary global economy exhibits unprecedented structural complexity—characterized by nonlinear dynamics, ...

Scientists are working across disciplines to render complex reality to scientific understanding. It has been the great triumph of the sciences to find consistent means of studying phenomena hidden by ...

Swarm is a multi-agent software platform for the simulation of complex adaptive systems. In the Swarm system the basic unit of simulation is the “swarm,” a collection of agents executing a schedule of ...

In the final episode of the season, Abha sits down with Melanie to hear her perspective. They chat about Melanie’s career and research with Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach. They ...

The simulation hypothesis — the idea that our universe might be an artificial construct running on some advanced alien computer — has long captured the public imagination. Yet most arguments about it ...

“. . . the true heir to Melville and Faulkner." —Harold Bloom, literary critic. "Today feels to me like a terrible disaster where many of us lost a good friend, the Santa Fe Institute lost one of its ...