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Overview
The Santa Fe Institute is an independent research centre dedicated to the study of complex adaptive systems across physics, biology, economics and computation. Its resident and external faculty pioneered work on emergence, networks, scaling laws and agent based modelling that underpins much of modern complexity science. The institute has no departments and deliberately mixes disciplines, running programmes that would not fit inside a conventional university structure; its summer schools have trained several generations of complexity researchers.
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Random walks get pushy
When physicists study a "random walk," they're investigating the path followed when you're allowed to take each step in a randomly determined direction. In a confined space, a random walker sometimes runs into obstacles and is forced to change course. A r
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The complexity of scientific optimism: A review of "It Could Be Otherwise"
SFI Fractal Faculty member Stuart Firestein's new book, It Could Be Otherwise, "proposes a subtly radical notion," writes SFI Professor Brandon Ogbunu in this review: "that optimism, as much as conflict, has always been a character in the development of m
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Change the number of searchers, change the efficiency of a quest
In natural and artificial systems, the act of searching is ubiquitous, but it's also complicated: Searchers may die off or disappear, and new searchers can join the hunt. But most rigorous investigations of searching assume a fixed number of agents. A new
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Modeling social inequality in epidemics
For decades, researchers have rigorously documented the way social inequality shapes the spread of disease. In parallel, mathematical models have emerged for forecasting epidemics and weighing different public health interventions. Now, a paper in Biology
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SFI welcomes 2026 External Professors
External Faculty are central to SFI's identity as a world-class research institute. They enrich our networks of interactions, help us push the boundaries of complex-systems science, and connect us to more than 70 institutions around the globe. This year,
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Implicit biases are harder to change in big cities than in small cities
Every human has implicit biases, or involuntary associations, about members of different social groups. But these biases are not fixed. Rather, they're malleable reflections of our everyday experiences. It's harder to change the biases of people living in
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Do deep learning models recognize 3D shapes in the same way humans do?
A chair can still look like a chair even when its surface is reduced to a sparse cloud of points. Humans are remarkably good at recognizing objects from this kind of minimal 3D information. A new study by SFI Program Postdoctoral Fellow Shuhao Fu and co-a
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Upending assumptions about learning, inspired by an AI phenomenon
More than a century of psychological research has assumed that, given constrained resources for storing information, learning should happen through forgetting most things but hanging onto only key themes. Some AI models, however, learnthrough supercharged
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Working group asks, what's the benefit of a brain?
The brain runs on about 15 to 20 watts, less than most light bulbs, but has still managed to evolve a voracious appetite for energy. In humans, it accounts for only about one-fiftieth of weight but consumes about 20% of our daily energy.Intelligence must
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