Santa Fe Institute

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The Santa Fe Institute (or SFI) is a non-profit research institute dedicated to the study of complex systems in Santa Fe, New Mexico founded by George Cowan, David Pines, Stirling Colgate, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Metropolis, Herb Anderson, Peter A. Carruthers, and Richard Slansky in 1984 to study complex systems. All but Pines and Gell-Mann were scientists with Los Alamos National Laboratory.

SFI's original mission was to disseminate the notion of a separate interdisciplinary research area, complexity theory (referred to at SFI as "complexity science"), but it has recently announced that its original mission to develop and disseminate a general theory of complexity has been realized (noting that numerous complexity institutes and departments have sprung up around the world — cf. CCS, CSCS at the University of Michigan, the CSE at UC Davis and the NECSI), and that it was working on updating its mission for the coming fifty years.

SFI's complexity research led to efforts to create artificial life modelling real organisms and ecosystems in the 1980s and 1990s.