MessageNorvig's article "Adaptive Software"
(http://norvig.com/adapaper-pcai.html) gave me more then this conference :-(
--Mikhail
----- Original Message -----
From: phil henshaw
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2007 9:30 AM
Subject: [FRIAM] SASO conference & things
The SASO conference last week
http://projects.csail.mit.edu/saso2007/program.html was on engineering
communication system self-organization and self-adaptation behaviors, and quite
remarkable for both the things people are doing and the broad new perspectives
that seem to be coming out. The two I found most telling were that Self-Org,
& Self-Adap. behaviors are being looked at now as two distinct things, the one
roughly the invention of new organization and the other the integration of
those new organizations in a larger context, and the other, that we may have
unexpected big problem. There's lots of creative work being done on the design
side, and some cautious poking around at the nature of the unexpected problem.
My contribution to the conference was a lot of good questions about how
engineered systems need to fit into and engage with natural systems, and I
found the group remarkably receptive, even absent the general lack of any
recognized physical science model for natural systems for us to use for the
connection (me just speaking from my own w/o discussing it). I also posted a
short paper that hopefully they'll read and be able to understand (
http://www.synapse9.com/PICS.htm ) These guys, like the NetSci-06 group in
May were all definitely looking 'outside' the normal engineering box, moving
away from 'system' as 'thing in a box' to 'complex system' as 'learning thing
in a box'.
The appearance of a surprise big problem comes partly from a new
understanding of how weak the core science is for how to build these things and
then understand what's been built. There is no theory, just experiments, and
for proofs only test sampling, nothing but statistical measures for things, no
behavioral ones, so that it seems clear that it'll be very hard to know what
behavior is being designed. This is important because one of the main motives
for commercializing these methods is to find new control strategies for the
ballooning complexity of the global net that is exceeding the capacities of the
engineers to design for in other ways. One simple example of the problem came
up in discussing Peer-to-Peer hosting of the routing tables of the net. You
need some model of trust, and in nature one of the most prevalent forms of
failure is the auto-immune reaction where the trust mechanism turns on itself.
That problem, was one of the kinds of things not foreseen in the papers
presented, demonstrating both how ready the engineers are to work with the real
problems, and how big the real problem really is.
The 2nd half of that, that to continue the growth of complexity in the system
people are thinking we need to move the world's information control structures
to this new paradigm of organization, indicates a growing recognition that any
way we're going seeming unlikely to work. I think they're talking about about
the same thing I have for a while. For a few years I've been describing it as
an approaching 'wall of complexity' from a natural systems perspective, a
natural product of growth beyond the organizational limits of the growth
system, having to do with systemically developing mismatching lag times. You
could also consider it at a 'ceiling of complexity' or just just the proverbial
'hitting the fan' in which something you care about gets chopped to bits and
can't be reassembled. A better physical model is turbulence, perhaps, where
the smooth flows of a system explosively disintegrate. Watching the
transition to turbulence in any physical system of flows helps you understand
the basic problem. It's one of these things that is good to see coming....!
;-) btw, my patent, still languishing for indecision in reviews at the PTO
after 12 years (!!!!), is for a way to extend the domain of smooth flow using a
general principle that may be extendable to other things....
Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
