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This model of complexity just doesn't make sense to me. So I looked it up on Wikipedia:

> Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence.[1]

Is a star topology wih 50 nodes more complex than a star topology with only 5? To me, there are concerns of size and scaling, but not complexity only given that as a problem. And according to Wikipedia, the difference in leaf nodes wouldn't increase complexity.

But that's exactly what the article is calling complexity, more nodes in a star topology!

And then it calls other things complexity that make even less sense:

> Blockbuster, too, was a network: one formed by the links that the company had with its customers [star topology again, like I pointed out above]. But by the early 2000s, those links started breaking down: The company was losing customers because its business model had become obsolete [and not because the business was too "complex," so let's blame complexity].

Maybe complexity works differently in physical chemistry. Maybe that just doesn't translate well outside of chemistry. I don't know. I just don't get it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity




There's no formal theory behind complexity. There's qualitative and scientific studies but I have seen any strict mathematical formalism around it that fully fleshes out that system A is more complex then system B definitively.

I remember reading that currently there is a movement take intuition of of complexity and transform it into a formalism. If you squint it looks like it's possible, however this isn't always true.

For example the term "life" can't really be formalized because the intuition encompasses a set of things that are over complicated and even blurry at times. It's a loaded word that spawns philosophical debates and nobody realizes they're debating about a poorly defined arbitrary concept. It could be that "complexity" is the same thing... personally it doesn't look that way to me, but I'm not sure.




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