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Antifragile refers to a property in which a system does not just resist breaking down under disorder and stressors (robust), but gains/learns/becomes stronger.
by SkyMarshal 10y ago
Antifragile refers to a property in which a system does not just resist breaking down under disorder and stressors (robust), but gains/learns/becomes stronger. A good example is how bones heal back stronger where they were broken.
While we are currently able to build self-healing systems of a sort, fault-tolerant Erlang systems being a good example, it doesn't seem we can build systems that are truly antifragile on their own, that would require strong AI. Otherwise, humans monitoring and intervention are required to improve systems under duress.
This manifesto does include "team" and "organization" to account for that, but a true autonomous antifragile system is a ways off.
- rjeli 10y agoSoftware such as fail2ban that bans harmful IPs and spam filters that learn over time would qualify as antifragile. I can't think of anything at the system security level.
- ctvo 10y agoYour bone example isn't accurate (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/health/19really.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/health/19really.html). The example used in the book are muscles (stress -> breakdown -> creating stronger muscles)
- sitkack 10y agoMaybe more accurately, bones subject to survivable progressively more intense stresses are stronger. It would be like an autoscaling algorithm under increasing loads (not delta function loads).
- Chris2048 10y agoI think a better example is balancing pendulums. They stay upright under random movement, but fall when things go still...