Norman Packard

Norman Harry Packard (born 1954 in Billings, Montana) is a chaos theory physicist and one of the founders of the Prediction Company and ProtoLife. He is an alumnus of Reed College and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Packard is known for his contributions to chaos theory, complex systems, and artificial life. He coined the phrase "the edge of chaos". Between 1976 and 1981, Packard formed the Dynamical Systems Collective at UC Santa Cruz with fellow physics graduate students, Rob Shaw, Doyne Farmer, and James Crutchfield. The collective was best known for its work in probing chaotic systems for signs of order. Around the same time, he worked with Doyne Farmer and other friends in Santa Cruz, California to form the Eudaemons collective , to develop a strategy for beating the roulette wheel using a toe-operated computer. The computer could, in theory, predict in what area a roulette ball would land on a wheel, giving the player a significant statistical advantage over the house. Although the project itself was a success, they ran into practical difficulty employing the technique on-site in Las Vegas casinos. The experiences of Norman, Doyne Farmer, and crew were later chronicled in the book The Eudaemonic Pie (1985) by Thomas Bass. Their experience was also chronicled on the History Channel television series "Breaking Vegas." In 1982, Packard won a NATO post-doctoral fellowship to study at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, France. One year later, he joined the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. At the IAS, he worked with colleagues Stephen Wolfram and Rob Shaw to explain complex systems and the tendency for matter to organize itself. Subsequently, Packard has made contributions to the field of Artificial Life, including the definition of Evolutionary Activity. In 1985 Packard moved with Wolfram to the physics department of the University of Illinois, where they founded the Center for Complex Systems Research.