Information Entropy As a Basic Building Block of Complexity Theory

Abstract

What is information? What role does information entropy play in this information exploding age, especially in understanding emergent behaviors of complex systems? To answer these questions, we discuss the origin of information entropy, the difference between information entropy and thermodynamic entropy, the role of information entropy in complexity theories, including chaos theory and fractal theory, and speculate new fields in which information entropy may play important roles.

Keywords

• information entropy
• thermodynamic entropy
• emergence
• chaos
• fractal
• complexity theory
• multiscale analysis