Readings

• Chaos, JP Crutchfield, JD Farmer, NH Packard, RS Shaw, Scientific American 255 (1986) 46–57.
• Odds, Stanislaw Lem, New Yorker 54 (1978) 38–54.

Topics:

1. Introduction and motivations
   1. The Industrial Age and the development of thermodynamics
   2. The Information Age and what?
   3. Information ≠ energy
   4. Deterministic chaos—Nature actively produces information
   5. What is randomness? Where does it come from?
   6. Pattern discovery (versus pattern recognition)
   7. Causality
   8. Logic of the course:
      1. Complex systems: order and chaos
      2. Self-organization: emergence of complexity
      3. Natural computation: how nature stores and processes information
   9. Goals:
      1. You can quantify unpredictability
      2. You can quantify structure
      3. These both are related to computation
   10. Applications
       1. Novel Computation
       2. Nanotechnology
       3. Automated scientific inference
2. Class survey: Interests, background, and abilities
3. Course logistics
4. Homework, exam, and project
5. Software tools and program development
6. Reading for next meeting: Articles above and Strogatz, chapters 1 and 2.
7. Homework: Everyday unpredictability (see website or handout)