Modelling Complex Systems with Statistical Mechanics: The Computational Approach

Real-world phenomena are often described by complex systems with competitive and cooperative behaviour. Such systems, as much as the described phenomena, are hard to understand in a scientific perspective mainly due to the lack of general exact solutions. For cases like this, the computational sciences provide a very useful virtual laboratory. The case of disordered systems is an example of scientific computing techniques being used to test theoretical predictions and uncover new phenomena that remain unreachable by traditional analytical methods.