The science of prediction lies at the heart of the modern world, but attempts to forecast even the most straightforward systems often confound scientists, while complex systems sometimes reveal themselves to surprisingly predictable.

Prediction is the decoder ring of the modern world, touching everything from healthcare, car insurance, politics, and terrorism, to sports, scientific discovery, and even the ride-hailing apps that are disrupting the taxi industry. In the age of bigger data and better algorithms, however, researchers are discovering straightforward systems that appear to be fundamentally unpredictable, as well as complicated systems whose behavior is surprisingly predictable.

Then again, this sort of thing is the norm when studying what researchers call complex systems, systems with many interacting elements whose collective behavior defies expectations based on their component parts. There may be simple patterns that organize seemingly chaotic events, but complicated limits to prediction in rather simple systems. Finding the organizing patterns and challenging the limits to prediction are at the core of complex systems research.

Systems that involve people can be particularly surprising, because human agency would seem to make accurate prediction impossible. After all, if an equation predicts that a stock trader or public official will take a particular course of action, that person can simply take a different course, rendering the prediction immediately wrong.

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