Figures such as a country’s gross domestic product or a city’s population size represent organizational and individual decisions over time. These statistics are useful for policymaking, but they hide ...

In a recent paper, SFI Professor David Wolpert, SFI Fractal Faculty member Carlo Rovelli, and physicist Jordan Scharnhorst examine a long-standing, paradoxical thought experiment in statistical ...

Every task we perform on our computer — whether number crunching, watching a video, or typing out an article — requires different components of the machine to interact with one another. "Communication ...

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 ...

Most people are aware of smoking's harmful health effects, yet many choose to light up regularly. If viewed from the lens of rational choice theory — an economic framework that suggests people always ...

Global markets are complex systems, shaped by feedback loops, sudden shocks, and adaptive behavior that rarely follow textbook rules and that can’t be captured by neat equations. At its core, ...

External Faculty are central to SFI’s identity as a world-class research institute. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex-systems science, and connect us to ...

It might start as a joke, a belief, or a rumor. At first, it’s easy to dismiss. But then it gains a twist, builds momentum, and spreads like wildfire. What causes some ideas to die out while others ...

This spring, the Santa Fe Institute’s Board of Trustees elected Ian McKinnon and Sam Peters as Board Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively. McKinnon and Peters, who both grew up in New Mexico, have multi ...

Humans learn by breaking through and plateauing, persisting and resting, and, occasionally, experiencing the blissful flow state. Mastering a skill can take decades, but the learning process unfolds ...

In a network, pairs of individual elements, or nodes, connect to each other; those connections can represent a sprawling system with myriad individual links. A hypergraph goes deeper: It gives ...