[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
>To determine if the web is a complex system,
>read the draft of the W3C web architecture.
>If the description there is clear to you,
>it isn't.
Complex systems are generally built up of simple components, I can't
remember where I read this anecdote, it was probably from James Gleick's
Chaos, early 90's I think, that a lot of physicists when they first saw
the meteorological data thought "I can solve that" but it turned out
that they couldn't. Think of it as being handed a Bayesian Network
written in Java, obsessively object oriented, with spaghetti code all
the way through. Looking at any segment of code might cause one to
think, I can do better than this, but in the end it turns out the
solution is to rewrite in LISP.
(heh heh, just a joke)
So given the traditional simple building blocks of true complexity
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/complexity/complexity.html
You maybe should have said: If the description there isn't clear to you,
it won't turn out to be a complex system.
>If you consider a hypermedia link
>a function call, then your vision is
>coherent.
A madman's vision is often coherent :)
> Unfortunately, it is
>too limited for the purpose of getting
>a research grant.
Darn. I was hoping to win an Ig Nobel.
>For the cultural Rummy example,
>what is coupled to the site where the term
>originated that enabled it to propagate
>quickly?
Actually I was against Rummy as an example of complexity.
|
