So where did you get this promotional hype? At least quote your sources. (Or did you write this?) The tone of that piece sounds like an advert telling me to invest $$$ into Santa Fe Inst. On 21 Jun 96 at 13:39, se7en wrote: [..]

The current thinkers are looking into not just mathematical complexity, but complexity itself. Complexity theory. Complex systems of any definition--the weather, perhaps, or the human immune system, or the organizational behavior of insects--and how their workings and adaptations might hold lessons for other fields, not least business. [..]

Methinks "Complexity theory" (aka Dynamical Systems Theory) is wonderful hype to get research grants. Certain people think by throwing money into this area that they can predict better, when much of theory deals with how these systems *cannot* be well predicted in *some* areas of behavior. Other people over-mystify the complexity of a system and declare *nothing* can be predicted, of course. Something akin to 60s-70s electrical utility exces bragging to each other on golf courses about how they own nuke plants. Hip thing now is for the company to invest in research or use methods based on "Chaos Theory"... you'll be really cool at parties if you drop those words to people. Any form of analysis that uses lots of variables gets labelled as having to do with "Chaos Theory" and the research grants grow, even though it may not deal with those variables as a *dynamic system*. Substance though? Not that studies in compelx systems are useless. By far the opposite. (though the question of useful to *who* is important. Using chaos theory to enhance methods of central control rather than allowing emergent behaviors is one downside of what some people are looking to the Santa Fe institute for.) Other than noting crypto in the first paragraph and mentioning SmartCards, what does this have to do with crypto and socio- political implications of widespread use of crypto? ObCrypto: similarities in literature on chaos theory and cryptanlysis. I've seens refs to using various forms of chaotic equations or cellular automata for crypto, but most of the writers seem ignorant of any crypto-literature (never mentioning that Wolfram's PRNG is crackable, for instance). Backburner Idea: if all 1D CA's are equivalent to LFSRs, and if [need to find refs to this alleged proof] all 2+D CA's have an equivalent 1D CA, then if a crypto algorithm can be duplicated as a CA... Alas I ramble on about ideas which I am not an expert at... Rob. --- No-frills sig. Befriend my mail filter by sending a message with the subject "send help" Key-ID: 5D3F2E99 1996/04/22 wlkngowl@unix.asb.com (root@magneto) AB1F4831 1993/05/10 Deranged Mutant <wlkngowl@unix.asb.com> Send a message with the subject "send pgp-key" for a copy of my key.