[FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

[Stephen Guerin]

 Nick asks:

> Is a hurricane a “complex system”?
>

It depends. What is your metaphor (model) of a hurricane?

If I wanted to understand how a hurricane forms, I might model dissipative
structure formation in the presence of temperature and pressure gradients.
I would call this a complex system.

If I needed to add a hurricane track simulation to our Simtable, for the
purposes of how my customers would use it for emergency planning, it would
probably be enough to model its track as a random walker biased by global
winds and a curve parameter to represent the Coriolis effect. I would not
call this a complex system.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20170528/5025fa0e/attachment.html>