Hello Grant,
welcome! Are you related to John H. Holland?
You asked an interesting question: "Why is the
organization and dynamics of living systems so
different from those of 'engineered' ones - and why are
their systemic properties so much more interesting?" I would
say because living systems are selfish and adaptive, they face
the problem of survival every single day, while engineered
systems are dumb and brittle, they do only what they
are programmed to do, and nothing else.
John von Neuman (1903-1957) said
"It's very likely that on the basis of the philosophy that
every error has to be caught, explained, and corrected,
a system of the complexity of the living organism would
not run for a millisecond."
He argued that living systems are fault-tolerant
because they can adapt themselves to errors and
changing conditions:
"The system is sufficiently flexible and well organized
that as soon as an error shows up in any part of it,
the system automatically senses whether this error
matters or not. If it doesn't matter, the system continues
to operate without paying any attention to it. If the error
seems to the system to be important, the system blocks
that region out, by-passes it, and proceeds along other
channels. [...] The duration of operability is determined
by the time it takes until so many incurable errors have
occurred, so many alterations and permanent by-passes have
been made, that finally the operability is really impaired."
And he argued that the fundamental difference in the
architecture is the ability to (re-)organize itself:
"The fact that natural organisms have such a radically
different attitude about errors and behave so differently
when an error occurs is probably connected with some other
traits of natural organisms [...] The ability of a natural
organism to survive in spite of a high incidence of error
probably requires a very high flexibility and ability of
the automaton to watch itself and reorganize itself."
Life is an exceptional state characterized by
self-* properties: self-reproduction, self-replication,
and self-maintenance, in short self-organization. When
it comes to large-scale computing systems - think of
Google or Amazon - you can discover many of
these self-* properties again. They have self-healing,
self-monitoring and self-configuring systems. Therefore
living systems and large-scale computing systems may
not be that different at all, they both require self-* properties,
which are inevitable if you want to build really large
systems that work.
Good luck with your paper,
Jochen
http://blog.cas-group.net/
( Quotes are from: John von Neumann,
"Theory and Organization of Complicated Automata",
4th Lecture "The Role of High and Extremely High
Complication" in John von Neumann on Computing
and Computer Theory, Vol. 12 in the Charles Babbage
Institute, Reprint Series for the History of Computing
Edited by William Aspray and Arthur Burks,
The MIT Press, 1987 )
----- Original Message -----
From: "Grant Holland" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, February 25, 2010 8:06 PM
Subject: [FRIAM] Hello, FRIAM
Dear FRIAM...
I'm excited and happy to subscribe to the group. (Thanks for the invite
Stephen, - and David.) For many years I have architected and implemented
large-scale (mostly Java) enterprise software (applications and systems)
for corporations and gov. institutions mostly in North America on behalf
of a number of major computer systems vendors (e.g. Sun). However, for
the past few years, my passion has turned to the question "Why is the
organization and dynamics of living systems so different from those of
'engineered' ones - and why are their systemic properties so much more
interesting?" From a practical perspective, I hoped to improve the
engineering of large-scale computing systems from this research; but in
reality I became fascinated with the theory, and so I had to (lovingly)
read lots of books and research articles.
Anyway, to drive toward an answer to above question, I have developed a
mathematical theory of living and lifelike systems, which I call
"Organic Complex Systems". A few months ago I began to write up an
overview of the results of my research so far. I am nearing completion
of that paper, and intend to publish it on arXiv.org in a couple of
months with the hope of getting comments, and hopefully collaborators.
BTW, perhaps somewhat more descriptive of this work is the subtitle of
this forthcoming paper: "A Comprehensive Theoretical Apparatus for
Modelling the Organization and Dynamics of Living and Lifelike Systems".
Anyway, these are my immediate interests. I'm looking forward to finding
out about yours.
Take care,
Grant
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
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
