Russell Wallace wrote:
On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 2:50 PM, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
No, ya dummy ;-) ... I wasn't criticising the Biosphere project itself!
Ah! Fair enough, I misunderstood you, then.
I was criticising your use of this as an example of how complexity can be
overcome in an engineered system by shear intuition and trial and error.
That was the context in which it was raised by Ben.
Okay, well, take any nontrivial engineered system and you'll see
complexity being overcome by intuition plus trial and error. Here's a
couple of very good posts by someone who designs microwave electronics
for a living:
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.nanotech/browse_thread/thread/ada3a83d1a284969/b713922d343e5371?lnk=st&q=#b713922d343e5371
The discussion is on CAD software, but the poster goes into a lot of
detail about exactly how complexity is dealt with (essentially a
mixture of avoiding it where possible and otherwise just going ahead
and doing the hard crunching or prototyping work).
Russell,
We are arguing past each other.
The reference you cite talks only about "complicatedness" --- as in, the
opposite of simplicity. In other words, the common usage of "complexity".
This has nothing to do with the very specific thing that is called
"complexity" in the sense of "complex systems" --- the things that are
studied all the time by people such as those at the Santa Fe Institute:
http://www.santafe.edu/
Any observations you make about complicated systems just have no bearing
whatsoever on the issue of complex systems. So, yes, it is well and
good to point out all the ways that engineers overcome "complicated"
systems. Valid, all of them. But just nothing to do with the issue at
hand.
The point is that there is a difference between the two that is an
absolute killer: you can use human ingenuity to overcome most
complicated systems, but it is easy to cross the line and try to build
something that, in fact, is *complex* (technical sense) ..... and if you
cross that line, you can apply your ingenuity till the end of the
universe and you will still have made zero progress.
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
agi
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