Herbert Simon - Alternative Views of Complexity (1996)

Another all-too-brief excerpt, this chapter is best treated as a trailer for Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial, his canonical ode to design and structural organisation. It's a bite-sized tour of the fashions in complexity theory since WW2:

• general systems theory, the laudable search for a universal set of properties that span all holistic systems
• cybernetics, control theory and feedback
• catastrophe theory, which describes bifurcations between stable and unstable states
• chaos theory, sensitivity to initial conditions and strange attractors
• cellular automata and the Game of Life (again); and
• complexity, evolution, and genetic algorithms.

Worth a read for some context - though note that this chapter was written in 1981, so many more recent models (neural nets, self-organized criticality, agent-based models) have since had their time in the complexity limelight.