The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe (New Mexico, United States) and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems.
The Institute houses a small number of resident faculty, who collaborate with many affiliated and visiting scholars. Although theoretical scientific research is the Institute's primary focus, it hosts a number of complex systems summer schools, internships, and other educational programs throughout the year.
The Institute's annual funding is derived primarily from private donors, grant-making foundations, government science agencies, and companies affiliated with its Business Network.
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The Santa Fe Institute was founded in 1984 by scientists George Cowan, David Pines, Stirling Colgate, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Metropolis, Herb Anderson, Peter A. Carruthers, and Richard Slansky. All but Pines and Gell-Mann were scientists with Los Alamos National Laboratory. In conceiving of the Institute, the scientists sought a forum to conduct theoretical research outside the traditional disciplinary boundaries of academic departments and government agency science budgets.
Research at the Institute focuses on systems commonly described as complex adaptive systems. Recent research has included studies of the processes leading to the emergence of early life, evolutionary computation, metabolic and ecological scaling laws, the fundamental properties of cities, the evolutionary diversification of viral strains, the interactions and conflicts of primate social groups, the history of languages, the structure and dynamics of species interactions including food webs, the dynamics of financial markets, and the emergence of hierarchy and cooperation in the human species, and biological and technological innovation.
Historically, researchers affiliated with the Institute played roles to varying degrees in the development and use of methods for studying complex systems, including agent-based modeling, network theory, computational immunology, the physics of financial markets, genetic algorithms, the physics of computation, computational chemistry and drug discovery, and machine learning.
The Institute also studies foundational topics in the physics and mathematics of complex systems, using tools from related disciplines such as information theory, combinatorics, computational complexity theory and condensed matter physics. Recent research in this area has included studies of phase transitions in NP-hard problems.
Some of the Institute's accomplishments are:
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SFI's original mission was to disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary research area, complexity theory referred to at SFI as "complexity science". Subsequent to the Institute's founding, a number of complexity institutes and departments were begun, including: