This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Laurent Bossavit. Original Post: On Complexity Feed Title: Incipient(thoughts) Feed URL: http://bossavit.com/thoughts/index.rdf Feed Description: You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all alike. You're in a maze of twisty little decisions, all different. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Laurent Bossavit Latest Posts From Incipient(thoughts)

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
-- C.A.R. Hoare

These new problems, and the future of the world depends on many of them, requires science to make a third great advance, an advance that must be even greater than the nineteenth-century conquest of problems of simplicity or the twentieth-century victory over problems of disorganized complexity. Science must, over the next 50 years, learn to deal with these problems of organized complexity. [...] Impressive as the progress has been, science has by no means worked itself out of a job. It is soberly true that science has, to date, succeeded in solving a bewildering number of relatively easy problems, whereas the hard problems, and the ones which perhaps promise most for man's future, lie ahead. We must, therefore, stop thinking of science in terms of its spectacular successes in solving problems of simplicity.
-- Warren Weaver

In our time, the technology of machines has drawn its inspiration from mechanics, dealing with complexity by reducing the number of relevant parts. The technology of government, on the other hand, has draw upon statistical mechanics, creating simplicity by dealing only with people in the structureless mass, as interchangeable units and taking averages. [...] For systems between the small and large number extremes, there is an essential failure of the two classical methods. On the one hand, the Square Law of Computation says that we cannot solve medium number systems by analysis, while on the other hand, the Square Root of N Law warns us not to expect too much from averages. By combining these two laws, then, we get a third - the Law of Medium Numbers:

For medium number systems, we can expect that large fluctuations, irregularities, and discrepancy with any theory will occur more or less regularly.

-- Gerald M. Weinberg