Artificial-intelligence systems have made remarkable progress in recent years, but they still struggle with the kind of ...

In the 1980s and ’90s, SFI played laboratory to a promising new method known as agent-based modeling. In ensuing decades, agent-based models (ABMs) proliferated across many fields, including economics ...

Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Maike Morrison builds mathematical tools to quantify and compare biological variation. Her ...

SFI Resident Professor Melanie Mitchell has received a 2025 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science ...

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 ...

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 ...

Large language models like GPT-4, the one behind ChatGPT, train on vast stores of data to complete one task: Produce a convincing sequence of words in response to a user’s written request. The tools ...

Medieval friar William of Ockham posited a famous idea: always pick the simplest explanation. Often referred to as the parsimony principle, “Ockham’s razor” has shaped scientific decisions for ...

Over the past three years, SFI has hosted an annual Complexity-GAINs school in different locations in Europe. The two-week-long programs, each focused on a unique theme, introduced Ph.D. students to ...

In fields ranging from immunology and ecology to economics and thermodynamics, multi-scale complex systems are ubiquitous. They are also notoriously difficult to model. Conventional approaches take ...