Traditionally one would argue that fundamental science would understand the basic principles and the complicated details would later be worked out in applied sciences or engineering. The insights from chaos and complex systems research showed that this inability to explain macroscopic phenomena was not merely a matter of the system being too complicated. If that were the case then one could solve more complicated problems by just building faster computers. It could be shown, however, that many of the problems associated with complex systems are "NP-complete" in the sense that even doubling the compute power would only marginally increase the capability to solve the problem.