Comments on: “Complex systems behave unpredictably” – Gupta’s law of complex systems

By: Chris Naden

Chris Naden — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 08:29:54 +0000

Dan: to (mis)quote Roy Castle, meditation is what you need

By: The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution › More on the Goat Rodeo Index

The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution › More on the Goat Rodeo Index — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:05:11 +0000

[...] approach then becomes to revert to command-and-control for any system which has to work, because complex systems behave unpredictably, and focus on getting that part [...]

By: Dan Olner

Dan Olner — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:57:29 +0000

You seem to have a self-confidence and seeming certainty that reminds me of Stafford Beer. Is that a fair reflection of how you feel? I’d be interested to know.

By: Edmund Harriss

Edmund Harriss — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:26:34 +0000

Its an interesting one, as you say it is repeatedly discovered. This is probably because it is easy to forget. In mathematics we want results that model, predict and control. We ignore the paths that lead to a lot of “I don’t know”. Yet there is a fascinating question out there. Can we start to describe what we can and cannot know?

By looking at the negative question of when our ability to control and predict will stop being stable we can work out how to design to stay stable (or fail to stable).

After all complex systems are not always unpredicatble. My glass of water is very complex, unimaginable numbers of molecules forming comlex weakly connected chains that then break apart. Yet at the level I am interested in it, it is predictable.

By: Vinay Gupta

Vinay Gupta — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 14:16:44 +0000

An addendum. The economy, understood from a connectionist perspective, is a great big decentralized “brain.” It exists to figure out what people want.

That’s why we look at economists in horror as they talk about stabilizing the markets.