ABSTRACT
The various groups in the Santa Fe Institute family studying complex adaptive systems (CAS) have somewhat different points of view and have adopted different vocabularies. Even the term CAS has different meanings for different researchers. A CAS gathers information about its surroundings and about itself and its own behavior, at a certain level of coarse graining. An excellent example of a CAS is the human scientific enterprise, in which the schemata are theories, giving predictions for cases that have not been observed before. In most CAS the level of the schemata and the level at which results are obtained in the real world are entirely distinct. More generally, it is significant that any CAS is a pattern-recognition device that seeks to find regularities in experience and compress them into schemata. Often it will find fake regularities where there is in fact only randomness.
