Optimal Design Quotes

Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

We're more into sort of fluid structures that are simultaneously the most efficient, the most beautiful, and the most engineered. You know what I mean? We like the balance you can get in there.

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.

You have to seek the simplest implementation of a problem solution in order to know when you've reached your limit in that regard. Then it's easy to make tradeoffs, to back off a little, for performance reasons. You can simplify and simplify and simplify yet still find other incredible ways to simplify further.

If you wanted to build the most powerful computer you could, you can't do better than including everything in the universe that's potentially available.

Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.

Junk, redundancy, and inefficiency characterize astrophysical signals. It seems they characterize cells and sea lions, too. These biological constructions have lots of superfluous and redundant parts, and are a long way from being optimally built or operated.

In my opinion, no single design is apt to be optimal for everyone.