Towards the global: complexity, topology and chaos in modelling, simulation and computation

Topological effects produce chaos in multiagent simulation and distributed computation. We explain this result by developing three themes concerning complex systems in the natural and social sciences: (i) Pragmatically, a system is complex when it is represented efficiently by different models at different scales. (ii) Nontrivial topology, identifiable as we scale towards the global, induces complexity in this sense. (iii) Complex systems with nontrivial topology are typically chaotic.