Complex systems can easily be described as the crossroad of science. This is the area where physics, economics, biology, computer science, and many other disciplines meet, to explain phenomena, and to use the dynamics of the observed phenomena to solve problems within their own domains. One of the aspects of studying complex systems is understanding the behavior and activities of multiple, distributed, adaptive, self-motivated computational entities, acting together or individually to accomplish certain objectives.

In computer science alone, the nomenclature describing collections of these entities varies depending on the research area; they may be referred to as teams, agents, groups, or cliques. In biology, ecology, and economics, they may be referred to as swarms (for example, of bees), colonies (of ants), or markets (of buyers and sellers). Obviously, there are domain-specific differences that are expected to exist in cross-disciplinary studies. Cross-disciplinary studies tend to inherently suffer from the lack of a unifying terminology and common context. However, the editors of this book have managed to overcome these issues, by providing a framework and a roadmap of the examined areas.

This computer science-centric collection of papers addresses particular issues in the design of complex systems, and successfully leverages concepts from other disciplines. The chapters, even though they stand independently, manage to create a contextually cohesive collection of papers. The book begins with an excellent survey of the state-of-the-art. The authors begin by introducing the term collectives, which encapsulates the notion of all the self-motivated computational entities, and proceeds by presenting how these collectives are treated by different approaches (biologically-inspired, computer science-based, and so on). The survey is truly a comprehensive piece of work, covering many of the aspects of collectives throughout the different disciplines.

The second chapter goes deeper into the analysis of collectives, providing the necessary structures and techniques for starting and updating collectives to increase global utility. Chapter 3 addresses mechanism design, and introduces a learnable design mechanism framework. The fourth chapter addresses the issues pertaining to global utility, and chapter 5 discusses the optimization and efficiency of the utility functions. The next chapter describes the handling of changes in the collective, even if those are dramatic. Chapter 7 illustrates communication and evolution within collectives. The next chapter deviates from the system domain, and describes the results of, and experiments with, many of the strategies as they are used with humans. Chapter 9 covers the techniques used to design self-configuring robots, and those being controlled by local rules. Chapter 10 describes the distributed control of collectives using biological and economics-based solutions. Chapter 11 describes information passing mechanisms, and how those affect the total utility outcomes when collectives are examined from the bottom-up, through local interactions. The next chapter presents methods of designing collectives from the bottom-up, through evolutionary algorithms. Finally, chapter 13 presents a market-based computational ecosystem approach to collectives.

Each chapter is packed with in-depth information and analysis, along with many formalisms and notation. All of the chapters are well written, and contain illustrative in-depth examples that often crystallize the theories that the authors present. However, the mathematical formalisms, and the overall rigor of the examples, may become very dense, and could be daunting for the casual audience. The book’s intended audience seems to be scientists, researchers, and perhaps students. It could be valuable to complex system researchers, and to advanced computer science students, with little or no prior complex systems experience. Students, however, will have to quickly swim in deep waters to keep up with the concepts. Unlike typical collections similar to this one, the quality of the papers is consistently high, with useful examples and experiment results.

Researchers and students will be pleasantly surprised by the wealth of the citations. Since each chapter stands alone, citations appear at the end of each chapter, and there is no need for a comprehensive bibliography at the end of the book. The book has an index and a preface by the editors.

The editors have done a wonderful job of avoiding the tedious concept repetition often found in collections of similar-topic papers by multiple authors. Some minor editorial errors, such as referring to a conference as the forum of the paper (chapter) instead of referring to it as a part of a book (chapter 8) are negligible oversights, and these do not diminish the overall quality and scientific value of the book. This is a highly recommended title.