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I don’t have enough brain jam to spread on this systems stuff these days, but it seems to me that they’re ignoring the dynamics of the way these software system
by greggsy 3y ago
I don’t have enough brain jam to spread on this systems stuff these days, but it seems to me that they’re ignoring the dynamics of the way these software systems operate within and around human social systems. Are they just seeking to describe a mathemagical model to predict the behaviour of a complicated system (ie. a 747), rather than a truly complex one (ie. mayonnaise)?
I didn’t get far enough to establish whether they had identified that each software system is not mathematically predictable, given they they will always (usually) be deployed, designed or behave differently, as a reflection of some human requirement (e.g. cost, ergonomics, supportability, speed, etc). That - to me anyway - is what makes technical systems-of-systems truly ‘complex’, as opposed to a series of complicated but entirely deterministic binary formulas.
- cs702 3y agoI barely made it through the abstract and introduction before realizing that I too don't have enough "brain jam to spread" on this at the moment. This paper isn't exactly, you know, light reading.
- fedeb95 3y agoI skim through it rapidly, but the paper seems interested in building a framework for finding out if and when a microstate participates in the outcome of the macrostate, or if the macrostate dynamics can be evaluated without looking at the microstate. That is, given a time series Z observed as a function of another time series X (what is called in the paper coarse-graining function), past values of Z are enough to establish causal connections with future values, without knowing X. This is what I understood, at least.
- rolph 3y agoif you really want to go down a rabbit hole there are some foundations that help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity_theory in particular; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system
- greggsy 3y agoThanks - I'm familiar with systems theories, but I wanted to understand whether anyone got far enough into the paper to determine whether they had covered the aspects mentioned in my post.