Adaptive Systems Quotes

I think if I were to express my wish, it would be that we are more regionally self-reliant. And I don't mean people being survivalists, I mean regionally self-reliant. So that you have these individual cells. The idea of having different solutions in different areas, so that we have a very robust, durable civilization.

You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

What I try to do in the book is to trace the chain of relationships running from elementary particles, fundamental building blocks of matter everywhere in the universe, such as quarks, all the way to complex entities, and in particular complex adaptive system like jaguars.

Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.

The great unexplored frontier is complexity ... I am convinced that the nations and people that master the new science of Complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century.

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.

Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse.

The best kind of design isn't necessarily an object, a space, or a structure: it's a process- dynamic and adaptable.

That order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive.

Things fall apart, so they can fall together at a higher level of order.

Cyborg doesn't need to eat or sleep, and whenever he encounters an issue that he's not initially equipped to handle, his technology can transmogrify and immediately adapt to that situation.

There's no way to design a society that's optimal or utopian. It's better than the one that was. Systems always undergo change.

Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system... I guess I would be nervous if my system was built on their technology too.

For the robust, an error is information.

In a sluggish system, aggressiveness produces instability. Either be patient or make the system more responsive.

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

Injecting some confusion stabilizes the system.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.

We design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us.

When they first built the University of California at Irvine they just put the buildings in. They did not put any sidewalks, they just planted grass. The next year, they came back and put the sidewalks where the trails were in the grass. Perl is just that kind of language. It is not designed from first principles. Perl is those sidewalks in the grass.

In order to survive, all systems must evolve by providing greater and greater access to the currents that flow through them. This applies to all physical, biological and social systems that survive and thrive.... But let’s take that one step forward... the systems just described are ... constantly evolving. This suggests another design principle: ... design for evolution rather than creating a static design optimizing for the present.

But once we got them on its feet then they run themselves, unless there's corrections you have to make.

By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation.

Every problem is super-interesting and has its own nuances, and you solve it today, but you try to solve it with an architecture. You build a machine to solve the problems that are like it later. And then you move on to the next.