Prof. John Holland delivered a lecture entitled “Steering Complex Adaptive Systems: Signals, Boundaries, and Niches” at AMSS on March, 31, 2011. More than 70 researchers and graduates attended the event.

The complex adaptive systems(cas) are systems with a diverse array of agents that adapt and evolve, or learn, as they are interact. Prof. John Holland pointed out that we must extract the mechanisms that underpin the origin and development of cas agents. The difficulty lies in constructing a model that yields formation and co-evolution of boundary and compartments. It is possible to use a generalization of the urn models of probability theory to illustrate these points. This generalization will be tied to Markov Processes as a way of proving theorems about the interaction of signals and boundaries.

The lecture is the first one of this year's Kwan Chao-Chih Distinguished Lecture Series. Kwan Chao-Chih Distinguished Lecture Series organized by the Institute of Systems Science of AMSS is to commemorate the late Prof. Kwan Chao-Chih's contributions on mathematics, systems, and controls, etc. He committed his whole life to functional analysis research and made important achievements in nonlinearity and functional analysis and neutron transport theory. He is one of the pioneers for modern control theory in China. 

Prof. John Holland is a professor of department of Psychology and department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He is also one of the founders of the Santa Fe Institute which is worldwide famous for its pioneer research in complex systems. Prof. Holland is known as the ‘father of Genetic Algorithms’ and he firstly proposed the framework of complex adaptive systems. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a fellow of the World Economic Forum. He has published four books on adaptation. Three of them have been translated into Chinese. He has been paid six visits to AMSS from 2002, which really push the study of complex systems.