This book provides the first clear, comprehensive, and accessible account of complex adaptive social systems, by two of the field's leading authorities. Such systems - whether political parties, stock markets, or ant colonies - present some of the most intriguing theoretical and practical challenges confronting the social sciences. Engagingly written, and balancing technical detail with intuitive explanations, "Complex Adaptive Systems" focuses on the key tools and ideas that have emerged in the field since the mid-1990s, as well as the techniques needed to investigate such systems. It provides a detailed introduction to concepts such as emergence, self-organized criticality, automata, networks, diversity, adaptation, and feedback. It also demonstrates how complex adaptive systems can be explored using methods ranging from mathematics to computational models of adaptive agents. John Miller and Scott Page show how to combine ideas from economics, political science, biology, physics, and computer science to illuminate topics in organization, adaptation, decentralization, and robustness. They also demonstrate how the usual extremes used in modeling can be fruitfully transcended.

本书是按照钱学森关于系统科学“三个层次一座桥梁”的体系框架结构撰写的，试图以最少的版面把系统科学的基本内容作一完整而精练的展示。本书的主旨不在于提供描述系统的完整、精确、实用的建模理论和方法，不追求数学工具的高深和漂亮，而在于帮助读者把握系统科学的基本思想、原理和方法论，了解系统科学前沿的可能生长点。本书的主要读者群设定为人文社会科学的研究生、博士生以及同等学力者，也希望对于系统理论和系统哲学的研究者能有所启示。