Santa Fe Institute - Research

Research

Research at the Institute focuses on systems commonly described as complex adaptive systems. Recent research has included studies of the processes leading to the emergence of early life, Evolutionary computation, metabolic and ecological scaling laws, the fundamental properties of cities, the evolutionary diversification of viral strains, the interactions and conflicts of primate social groups, the history of languages, the structure and dynamics of species interactions including food webs, the dynamics of financial markets, and the emergence of hierarchy and cooperation in the human species, and biological and technological innovation.

Historically, researchers affiliated with the Institute played roles to varying degrees in the development and use of methods for studying complex systems, including agent-based modeling, network theory, computational immunology, the physics of financial markets, genetic algorithms, the physics of computation, computational chemistry and drug discovery, and machine learning.

The Institute also studies foundational topics in the physics and mathematics of complex systems, using tools from related disciplines such as information theory, combinatorics, computational complexity theory and condensed matter physics. Recent research in this area has included studies of phase transitions in NP-hard problems.

Some of the Institute's accomplishments are:

• SFI's complexity research led to efforts to create artificial life modeling real organisms and ecosystems in the 1980s and 1990s.
• Foundational contributions to the complexity economics school of thought.
• The "Evolution of Human Languages" project, an attempt to trace all human language to a common root (cf. Proto-World).