Complexity Theory

I've been looking into Calgary as a possible next step in my education. One thing that is attractive about it is the contingent of AI researchers that investigate swarm intelligence. In addition to my interest in functional languages and the subjects that surround them, I really like emergent behavior in complex systems, and I've always found swarms of things to be beautiful. The massive random-seeming complexity and high-order structure is both interesting and potentially useful. It is my opinion that this type of behavior has wider reaching (and more beneficial) consequences then anything else I could study (why I believe this is complex- perhaps some other day I will post about it).

In this spirit I read a book called Complexity by Melanie Mitchell. Her work also introduced me to Genetic Algorithms (and her discussion of Messy Genetic Algorithms is my inspiration for Messy Gene Expression Programming), and now to complexity theory, which underlies the type of emergent intelligence that swarms are known to exhibit. The book is very interesting, covers a wide variety of topics, and is very recent- published in 2009. The step by step description of the program Copycat was instructive, and I appreciate the overview of some ideas of the structure, definition, and difficulties of the concepts of information, computation, etc.

I think it is interesting that, given the distribution of gender in the field of computer science, that Melanie Mitchell should be an inspiration to me in complexity, Candida Ferierra the inventor of the field I'm doing my research in, and Xin Li's PGEP my favorite version of GEP which I hope to propose a variation of as my masters thesis. I wonder if complexity and AI has a better gender distribution then the field as a whole or if this is a coincidence.