Complexity Lab Manual Table of Contents

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ORGANISMS
1) Collect Ant Colonies
2) Observe Ant Behavior
3) Cooperative Organization In Social Insect Colonies
4) How a Honeybee Colony Decides On a New Nest.
5) Key Out Ants Under Dissection Scope.
6) Key Out 100 Plants In A Local Park
7) Insect Diversity
8) From Transistors To Computers
9) Can We Build Ant Robots?
10) Program Ant Simulations
11) Self Sustaining Ecosystem Of Reproducing Robots?
12) Ant Anatomy: Dissect Insects
13) Ant Brains: Photomicrographs
14) Dissect An Automobile, Ants Are MORE Complicated!
15) How Are Automobiles Built?
16) So How ARE Ants Built?
17) Watching Flower Or Mushroom Development
18) Back To Brains. How To Imagine 20Billion Neurons.
19) What Is A 20Billion Neuron Brain Capable Of?
20 How Complex Is Language?
21) How Many Connections Between Words?


LIVING CELLS
22) Look At Pond Water.
23) Watch Stentor
24) Watch Euglena, Bacteria
25) What Are The Building Blocks For Cells?
26) Paper Chromatography
27) Microstructure Of Cells
28) Metabolic Wall Chart!
29) Which Has More Moving Parts: A Bacteria Or New York City?
30) Visualize All The Detail In One E. Coli
31) Distributed Brownian Motion Machinery: Clathrin Coated Pits
32) The DNA Is NOT The Brain!


PHYSICAL/CHEMICAL DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS FAR FROM EQUILIBRIUM: difference in temperature leads to disorder in the total system by way of energy flow which however can lead to INCREASE in order in a subsystem
33) Build A Steam Engine
34) Benard Convection
35) Taylor Cuette Vortices Between Two Spinning Surfaces
36) Combine Convection With A Spinning Earth And We Get Global Weather Patterns
37) Storm Cells
38) Vortex Streets
39) Weather On Jupiter
40) Dynamic Processes In Mineral Formation
41) After 4.5Billion Years Of Mixing, The Earth Has NOT Blended To Homogeneity
42) Belousov-Zhabotinski Reaction
43) Deep Sea Manganese Nodules
44) Play With A Candle Flame
45) Suns Have Complex Dynamic Organization
47) Simplest Organic Redox Cycle


MATHEMATICAL DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS:

CELLULAR AUTOMATA
48) John Horton Conway's Game Of Life
49) Game Of Go
50) Cellular Automata With NON Local Rules.
51) Cellular Automata Robust Under Random Fluctuations
52) Cellular Automata With Random Input
53) Explore The Space Of 1 Dimensional Cellular Automata
54) Kauffman's NK Boolean Networks
55) Coin Flipping And Random Walks

DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS
56) 3n+1 game
57) An Integer Dynamical System With A Curious Array Of Orbits
58) Iterates Of The Unimodal Map: Intro To Concepts In Mathematical Dynamical Systems
59) 3 Body Problem In Newtonian Mechanics
60) Lorenz Attractor and Chaotic Waterwheel
61) Compare Various Combinations Of Discrete And Continuous In These Dynamical Systems

EXAMPLES FROM COMPUTER SCIENCE AND CYBERNETICS
62) Positive Feedback
63) Binary Search
63.5) Examples Of Trial And Error Algorithms
64) Negative Regulatory Feedback
65) Compare Trial And Error With Direct Prediction
66) Data vs. Algorithm
67) Hierarchical vs. Distributed Control
68) Iteration vs. Recursion
68) Exploratory Play Algorithms


PATTERN FORMATION AT EQUILIBRIUM. PHYSICS/CHEMISTRY:
70) Collect And Learn About Rocks And Minerals
71) Listen To The "How Rocks And Minerals Form" Exhibit At The American Museum of Natural History
72) Molecules Have Shape
73) 10 Million Billion Billion Molecules Of Water In A Glass
74) Periodic Chart Of Elements
75) Phase Transitions In Water: Breath, Oceans, And Snowflakes
76) Phase Transitions For Sulfur: Even Wilder!
77) We Couldn't Predict Buckyballs After 60 Years Of Quantum Chemistry


PATTERN FORMATION AT EQUILIBRIUM. MATH:
propose a set of rules and let them play out and you often find you get a set of discrete entities which follow them that is interestingly diverse but not infinitely chaotic!
78) Prime Numbers,
79) Fibonacci Numbers
80) 5 Platonic Solids
81) Classification Of Finite Simple Groups
82) Combinatorics
83) Linear, Polynomial, Exponential, Factorial...
84) Exponential Growth
85) Integer, Rational, Real
86) Analog vs. Digital
87) Enumerations Of Finite Graphs
88) Zero One Laws In Random Graphs
89) Must Be Tons More Math


PUT IT BACK TOGETHER: EVOLUTION
90) Diversity And Disparity Of Life
91) There Are At Least 3 Styles Of Design
92) Collect Fossils
93) Geology, Strata, Time
94) Geochemical History
95) Word Mutation Game
96) Tierra, An Ecosystem Of Evolving, Reproducing Computer Programs
97) Theory Of Darwinian Evolution


THE FINAL FRONTIER. LIFE FROM CHEMISTRY?
98) Ecosystem Of Reproducing Candle Wicks?
99) Self Sustaining Ecosystem Of Reproducing Chemical Robots?
100) Chemical Origin Of Life