Recursive Yin Yang 4

Recursive Yin Yang 4 by ~hawmkoonstormbringer on deviantART

The basic construction of a yin-yang symbol is to take a circle and two circles of half the radius, sitting along one axis. I used this substitution recursively with a 90 deg. rotation: For the smaller circles, add two more circles of half their radius (one fourth of the original circle). Continue substituting, and you end up with this figure. The interesting thing is that not only the surfaces are fractal, but also the line separating the two colors.

The figure can carry several messages, apart from those of yin yang: e.g. there is also struggle, balance, and interaction at different scales.

This work is dedicated to our friend and compadre Dr. Igor Lugo, who recently defended his PhD.

Tentative Laws of Information

All phenomena can be described as information, so these laws try to describe general features found across all scales.

1. Law of Information Transformation. Information will potentially be transformed by interacting with other information.
2. Law of Information Propagation. Information propagates as fast as possible.
3. Law of Requisite Complexity. More complex information will require more complex agents to perceive, act on, and propagate it.
4. Law of Information Criticality. Transforming and propagating information will tend to a critical balance between its stability and its variability.
5. Law of Information Organization. Information produces constraints that regulate information production.
   

These tentative laws are generalizations of Darwinian, cybernetic, thermodynamic, and complexity principles.

More details and examples in:

• Gershenson, C. (2007). The World as Evolving Information. In Proceedings of International Conference on Complex Systems ICCS2007.