Santa Fe Institute

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The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is a non-profit research institute, located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States, dedicated to the study of complex systems. The aim of the institute was to create multi-disciplinary groups of young scientists to discuss alternative means to tackle current problems. The aim was to expose young scientists to alternative scientific approaches, and to learn about emerging scientific fields. The early scientific strands that proliferated at the institute were: genetic programming (with John Holland), neural networks (Andreas Weigend), fractals, artificial life, quantum computing... Part of the drive for the cross-pollinating emphasis of SFI was that the main scientific branches (physics, mathematics, etc.) had reached a plateau and weren't contributing much during the 1980-1990s. It was thought that opening up fields to new ideas and approaches were key to obtain new insights.

Overview

The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by George Cowan, David Pines, Stirling Colgate, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Metropolis, Herb Anderson, Peter A. Carruthers, and Richard Slansky. All but Pines and Gell-Mann were scientists with Los Alamos National Laboratory.

SFI's original mission was to disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary research area, complexity theory referred to at SFI as "complexity science". Recently it has announced that its original mission to develop and disseminate a general theory of complexity has been realized. It noted that numerous complexity institutes and departments have sprung up around the world, including the following:

Some of the other accomplisments of the SFI are:

  • SFI's complexity research led to efforts to create artificial life modeling real organisms and ecosystems in the 1980s and 1990s.
  • From various works of the SFI school of the complexity economics thought was founded .
  • SFI is coordinating the "Evolution of Human Languages" project, an attempt to trace all human language to a common root (cf. Proto-World).[4][5]

Faculty associated with the Santa Fe Institute

External links

References

  1. CCS, CSCS; The main faculty involved in this was John Holland
  2. CSE
  3. Institute Para Limes in Europe, retrieved 01 April 2008.]
  4. Evolution of Human Languages
  5. Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one. USA Today, 20 July 2007. [1]
  6. John L. Casti: Biography
  7. Douglas R. White - InterSciWiki