> Without trying to manage complexity, it becomes impossible to build real systems. Managing complexity is necessary for human designers and the limitations of

> Without trying to manage complexity, it becomes impossible to build real systems. Managing complexity is necessary for human designers and the limitations of their brains. Nature appears to be able to evolve more and more complex mechanisms by random mutation + Darwinian selection. It remains an open problem if there is an upper bound for the level of complexity that such a mechanism is able to generate. > Well, yes, to a degree. Any computation is equivalent to the operation of a machine (as Turing and Church demonstrated). A computer program is a representation of the configuration of a machine. The problem is that people underestimate how deep the concept of machine is (for example, by not being aware of Gödel's work). > But if you arbitrarily change a word in a 1000 page book, the book will not fall apart. This is a property of a type of program (the typical type that humans create). Many algorithms are known that can be much more tolerant to random perturbations (e.g neural networks). It just so happens humans are better at designing linear, synchronous mechanisms.