Preface

The meaning of complexity is a subject of intense debate in exact sciences, systems biology, and social science. Systems of many components, such as proteins at the cellular level, cells at the organ level, or agents at the social level, provide complexity science a ubiquity that has percolated all branches of knowledge. In all these cases, emergent behaviors result from the coordinated action of different components and constitute new global system properties. These new properties allow the system to adapt to the environment in an organized manner that will continue to demand new features for its survival. This leads to the evolution of systems as a natural consequence of the complexity associated with them.

This book intends to deepen the general meaning of complexity from different points of view, to inquire about the different statistical and computational valid paradigms in social and natural systems. The first part focuses on social systems and includes chapters on different approaches to the traveling salesman problem (Chapter 1 by Weiqi Li), models of opinion dynamics creation (Chapter 2 by Prieto Curiel), and a universal theory for knowledge formation in children (Chapter 3 by Droboniku, Kloos, et al.). The second part addresses different natural systems from a complexity perspective, in particular, the evaluation of landscape organization and dynamics through information entropy indicators (Chapter 4 by Piqueira et al.) and the study of the performance of wind farms with the use of artificial neural networks (Chapter 5 by Velázquez-Medina and Portero-Ajenjo). All these chapters present some new perspectives and applications within the broad field of complexity science. We hope that this book will be useful as a guide to an audience interested in the different problems and approaches within the theory of complexity.

As the editor of this book, I would like to thank all the authors who have contributed to this volume. I must also express my gratitude to the editorial staff at IntechOpen, particularly Author Service Manager Ms. Marijana Francetic. I am also grateful to my family, friends, and advisors. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the victims of COVID-19.

> **Ricardo López-Ruiz** University of Zaragoza, Spain

Section 1

Theory of Complexity in

Social Systems

**1**

Section 1
