Applications are open for the 2026 cohort of SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellows, who hold the Omidyar Fellowship. This ...

Traditional models of how culture spreads were designed to describe early civilizations, typically focused on hunter-gatherers and almost always on pre-industrial societies. Today, a myriad of factors ...

In a recent analysis, SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow Yuanzhao Zhang and collaborator William Gilpin reported that one foundation model called Chronos could generate predictions of chaotic ...

SFI External Professors Alison Gopnik and Scott Page are among 120 new members of the National Academy of Sciences announced this week. Election to NAS recognizes the members’ “distinguished and ...

Scientists usually use a hypergraph model to predict dynamic behaviors. But the opposite problem is interesting, too. What if researchers can observe the dynamics but don’t have access to a ...

In many careers, a person must learn foundational skills before advancing more deeply into their profession. A recent paper in Nature Human Behavior mapped the dependency relationships ...

SFI External Professor and Science Steering Committee member Michelle Girvan (University of Maryland) has been elected President of the Network Science Society, an organization that supports an ...

A new paper in PNAS shows that the idea of “taking turns” could help resolve the 1960s paradox of the plankton — and better predict how climate change will remake our ...

Using a variety of analogy puzzles, SFI researchers have shown that the reasoning abilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model fall short when faced with small changes. Recognizing the limitations of these ...

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 ...

Cultural traits — the information, beliefs, behaviors, customs, and practices that shape the character of a population — are influenced by conformity, the tendency to align with ...

Multi-scale complex systems are ubiquitous and also notoriously difficult to model. In disturbed systems, conventional bottom-up or top-down approaches can’t capture the interactions between the ...