Is He on the Level? The Master of Complexity.

“Is he on the level?” and “What level?” are two questions you might ask after learning about Dr. Michael Lamport Commons and the 16 levels he invented. The 16 levels are parts and parcels in Dr. Michael Lamport Commons’s “Model of Hierarchical Complexity.” The model rates how complex a person (or a bacterium) is, compared […]

People’s preferences for complex explanations (new study)

Those who are keen on the principle of Occam’s Razor [“Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate” or “Plurality is not to be posited without necessity” or “Keep it simple”] may be surprised, perhaps even dismayed, by a new research project which hints at its unpopularity. “[…] we find that people have a preference for complex […]

The Visual Aesthetics of Snowflakes (new study)

Given a selection of snowflakes – some with simple structures and others more complex – which do people prefer? To find out, Olivia C. Adkins, who is a Graduate Research Assistant at Western Kentucky University, US, and J. Farley Norman, University Distinguished Professor, also at Western Kentucky University, devised at set of experiments. They showed […]

When is a Transport Map Too Complex for Your Brain?

This new study explains, maybe, why so many people feel overwhelmed in navigating a big city by metro or bus. The study is: “Lost in transportation: Information measures and cognitive limits in multilayer navigation,” Riccardo Gallotti, Mason A. Porter, Marc Barthelemy, Science Advances, epub February 19, 2016. The authors, at the Institut de Physique Théorique, France, the […]

The school of complexity

Some like it simple. For those who do not, there is the International School of Complexity: (Thanks to investigator Andrea Rapisarda for bringing the school to our attention.) Earlier in the year, complexity (and Lipschitz-continuous Hessians) will be the subject of a talk at Imperial College London: Worst-case complexity of nonlinear optimization: where do we stand? […]