1A) Something that exhibits effective complexity is shaving. With the stroke of a razor, a 2 dimensional area of skin is shaved, removing the hair that's growing there. The goal of shaving is to remove enough of these areas around your face so that there's no hair left. The shapes of these areas have to be arranged so that:
-Every point on your face lies in one of the areas
-You don't shave the same place too many times and give yourself razor burn (these areas will have many areas overlapping them)
Most people do this by shaving an area at the edge of the face, and then removing the hair around it until the face is empty of hair or they start working on a different section. These areas are arranged and ordered so that the edge of each stroke slightly overlaps the edge of the previous stroke. Longer strokes make for more efficient shaving because it reduces the number of strokes and the area of overlapping shapes.
Shaving is pretty chaotic because it depends on the person's abilities and methods of packing shapes into a area. Everyone who shaves is generally going to remove the hair that they want to remove, the most variation lies in the razor strokes that remove that area of hair.
1B) The Problem of Meaning touches on some interesting ideas in terms of finding purpose and meaning in generative art. The idea behind generative art is to create functioning systems where each component interacts with another in a ordered, calculated way. The reasoning and logic behind the systems operations or products is what is interesting about the art. If these systems are based on systems that already exist, the art becomes the study of that system and the ability to simulate it in a different medium (like simulating the way clouds form in code).
These systems are designed by artists with a product in mind. Despite the fact that a generative work may be based off of an existing natural system, the artist has to understand that system in order to exploit or reproduce it. It's a study of how humans reason over dynamic processes.