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
============================================================
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
============================================================
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
