Complexity
There are different senses of complexity:
- In information processing, complexity is a measure of the total number of properties transmitted by an object and detected by an observer. Such a collection of properties is often referred to as a state.
- In computer science, the study of how much time and memory a computer algorithm may take is the field of computational complexity theory.
- Complexity is often used as a shorthand for the field that developed in the late 1980s around the use of mathematical and computational modeling of biological, economic and technological systems known as "complex systems" (sometimes complex adaptive systems).
- In the sense of how complicated a problem is from the perspective of the person trying to solve it, limits of complexity are measured using a term from cognitive psychology, namely the hrair limit.
- In mathematics, Krohn-Rhodes complexity is an important topic in the study of finite semigroups.