@abde Hello, thanks for the welcome! It's been interesting so far, only been a couple of days, but it def feels more conversational and less like everyone just shouting into the void and bracing for a response.

On complexity, I like to share a book on the Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter -- https://archive.org/details/TheCollapseOfComplexSocieties

His thesis is that civs grow and evolve to become more complex as they need to solve increasingly complex problems, as well as maintaining the solutions to the previous complex problems.

Eventually this reaches the point where new solutions produce diminishing returns given the amount of effort; growth slows and turns into stagnation as the previous solutions aren't maintained (infrastructure, rule of law) and the civ begins to unravel until an external event that was manageable before, breaks the whole system (war, cataclysm, etc).

When it comes to computer science, I find the questions of computabiity and complexity as it relates to how the ability to compute scales with their size of the input(s) ... this relates to the first interest in collapse because I think of civilization itself as a computational system underneath all the shouting, laughing, fighting, eating, sleeping, and sex.

Tell me more about numerical simulations! I was in a PhD program for a minute before COVID kinda blew up my life. I was working on a paper doing categorical analysis of patterns in prime numbers.